Books & ideas

Raised Among the Ruins

Charlotte Canizo — 2026-03-05T09:00:00Z

By adopting a child's perspective, Camille Mahé shows that younger children perceived the Second World War differently than adults.

Dual Identity

Victor Lu Huynh — 2026-02-10T07:00:00Z

How do children construct their racial identity? Based on a groundbreaking study of children from so-called “mixed” couples, Solène Brun explores the processes of racialization within family structures.

Marginal childhood

Nassim El Kabli — 2025-09-11T07:30:00Z

Marginal and maladjusted childhood (which includes orphans, vagabonds, and delinquents) has a history. While the concept has been condemned, it has also been studied extensively and resulted in institutions designed to deal with it.

Making Children into Adults

Bernard Schneuwly — 2024-04-16T11:59:20Z

Vygotsky is a major educational theorist credited with showing how the mind of the child is formed. In this book, Pascal Sévérac explains what Vygotsky's theory owes to Spinoza's.

A Different Way of Teaching?

Benoît Peuch — 2024-03-26T08:58:54Z

Educating children by respecting their spontaneous interests: Such is the promise of alternative pedagogies. Subjecting these promises to sociological critique, Ghislain Leroy shows that they are not necessarily emancipatory and may even contribute to the reproduction of social inequalities.

To Educate is to Teach to Die

Benoît Peuch — 2023-04-13T06:42:00Z

Through a meditation on what might constitute a Spinozist education, Pascal Sévérac considers the passage from childhood to adulthood as that from one nature to another and organizes the rules of a good education around the notion of affectivity.

Operation Pied Piper: Britain's Forgotten War Children

Marilyn Johnston — 2021-12-23T09:29:16Z

On the eve of the Second World War, more than a million British children were evacuated to the countryside for their protection. Hailed as a patriotic success, the ‘Operation Pied Piper' was actually marred by accusations of abuse. Despite growing media coverage and public awareness, survivors still await reparation.

The Seeds of Inequality

Georges Felouzis & Barbara Fouquet-Chauprade — 2021-07-12T07:00:00Z

Poverty and great social inequality are being created at this very moment in the routines of small children. Talking, eating, socializing, taking care of oneself, keeping oneself clean, dressing, obeying, and learning: children's sociological future is determined by the adoption of even the most trivial of habits.

The Little Society of Children

Nicolas Sallée — 2018-01-18T08:00:00Z

How do children perceive the world around them, from the circles closest to them – their friends and family – to the most distant spheres – work and politics? In a recent book, two French sociologists open up a critical dialogue with psychology to describe the socially differentiated processes through which children learn to think and think about themselves.

What Same-Sex Parenting Does to Kinship

Jean-Hugues Déchaux — 2015-12-14T08:00:00Z

What are the effects of same-sex parenting on the kinship system of Western societies? A collection of international papers edited by two anthropologists of kinship lead them to reject the thesis of an anthropological break or the claim that the current kinship system has been disrupted. Instead, they emphasize the centrality of multiple parenting.