Virginia Caputo

Biography

Virginia Caputo received her Ph.D. in Social Anthropology at York University in 1996, holding a SSHRCC doctoral fellowship. Early in her career, she was awarded the Swedish Institute’s Council of Europe scholarship, and the Sir Ernest MacMillan research award in recognition of the importance of enlarging the horizons of music research to include Canadian children’s lives. Virginia is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology and Director of the Landon Pearson Resource Centre for the Study of Childhood and Children’s Rights at Carleton University. Virginia has received several teaching awards and nominations since coming to Carleton in 1997 including a Carleton University Student Association teaching award. From 2005 to 2009 she directed the Pauline Jewett Institute of Women’s Studies, helping to design and launch a graduate programme on the themes of transnational feminisms and globalization. Her particular contribution is her expertise on girlhoods, gendered childhoods and the changing contours of young people’s lives in the context of globalization. Virginia’s interdisciplinary work lies at the intersection of feminism, anthropology, and childhood/girlhood research. Her ethnographic research focuses on investigating the lives of children, especially girls and young women, viewed as engaged social actors. She has contributed to the literature in anthropology, feminist scholarship, and feminist musicology. Her current book under review, tentatively titled, Gendered Childhoods in a Globalized World, examines the convergences and divergences of key debates found in the fields of childhood studies, feminism, and globalization studies. A second theoretical project on the concept of network as a device to understand social relationships appears in the book Thinking Through Sociality. An Anthropological Interrogation of Key Concepts by Berghahn Press, (2015). Her article “Too Young to Wed: Globalized Connections and Gendered Economies of Visibility” is under review. Virginia launched a new research area last year — gender, childhood and health – with a project that focuses on the links between food practices, gendered identities and children’s lives, as well as a new journal (with Landon Pearson). Virginia is the managing editor of the Canadian Journal of Children’s Rights.

Research Interest

Gendered childhoods, girlhood, children’s rights, feminist theories and methodologies, transnational feminism, globalization, schooling, youth and media, violence, health