GOVAN FOLK UNIVERSITY (Glasgow) Talk: They Riddle of the Childscape by Jay Griffiths Friday 14th June 6 - 8:30 pm At the PEARCE INSTITUTE 840-860 Govan Rd, Glasgow G51 3UU Entry by donation (£1) You are warmly invited to join us as author Jay Griffiths shares her latest book ‘Kith: The Riddle of the Childscape’. This is the opening event of the Govan Folk University’s ‘Puppets in Partnership’ festival on 15 & 16 June (for full programme see govanfolkuniversity.org ). While travelling the world in order to write her award-winning book Wild, Jay Griffiths became increasingly aware of the huge differences in how childhood is experienced in indigenous cultures. From communities in West Papua and the Arctic to the ostracised young people of contemporary Britain, she asks why we have enclosed our children in a consumerist cornucopia but denied them the freedoms of space, time and deep play. She uses anthropology, history, philosophy, language and literature to illustrate children’s affinity for the natural world, for animals and woodlands, and examines the quest element of childhood. Arguing that the risk-averse society enfeebles children, robbing them of the physical freedom they both want and need, Griffiths illustrates how the stress of overscheduled lives denies children their hours of un-clocked reverie. Kith examines the history of breaking the will of the child and explores issues of childhood privacy, contemporary surveillance, the importance of folk tales, children’s relationship with pets and the profound politics of childhood. It looks at the extraordinary psycho-drama played out when Settler children, taken by Native Americans, refused to be rescued, and includes the way children have seized power over their own lives. A book of stories, it includes the one real-life Lord of the Flies situation – with the result the reverse of Golding’s bleak vision. In its urgent defence of the rights and needs of every child, Kith is an impassioned, illuminating analysis of the heart of human experience. Jay Griffiths previous books include Wild: An Elemental Journey which won the inaugural Orion Book Award and was shortlisted for the Orwell prize; Pip Pip: A Sideways Look at Time which won the Barnes and Noble Discover Award for best new non-fiction writer in 2003; Anarchipelago and A Love Letter To A Stray Moon, a fictionalised biography of Frida Khalo.
Posted on: Fri, 07 Jun 2013 12:29:45 +0000
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