admin | 28 Mar 2007 - 13:28 | All Subjects
Juliet Houghton took Brunel’s MSc course in Cross-Cultural Studies of Children, Child Development and Youth and has recently received the National Children’s Champion Award.
“As a children’s HIV specialist nurse working with children and families from sub-Saharan Africa, I was delighted to find a part-time Master’s course that considered children and young people when trying to understand how culture is constituted and transformed. This MSc was particularly attractive to me as it worked on the premise that children are not simply passive recipients of culture, but rather are actively and creatively involved in constituting their worlds.
I was inspired by the quality of lectures and seminars given by experienced scholars, and through them I learned to critically reflect upon a broad range of concepts relevant to anthropology, psychology, biomedicine, philosophy, cognitive theories, ethics and research methods. The highlight came during my dissertation fieldwork, which offered an incredible opportunity to observe how children and families from sub-Saharan Africa make sense of HIV-related healthcare information in the UK. This research proposed more questions than it answered, as although I’d gained valuable insights into what sense children make of HIV, my participants revealed numerous other areas of interest that warranted still further study.”
