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Julie Spray

@juliespray.bsky.social

1.5K followers 1.6K following 170 posts

Childhood & medical anthropologist, child health researcher, Lecturer at University of Galway Ireland, Pākehā New Zealander, she/her, never enough cats. I study people because they fascinate & confuse me. Children make most sense though. We like to draw.

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Julie Spray

@juliespray.bsky.social

If you noticed yourself saying “yes” to some of these questions, you might consider how adult-centric bias may be influencing your research or practice.

Adult centrism is the assumption that adults’ perspectives, experiences, ways of knowing, and priorities are the most valid, important, or normal.

Adult-centrism is a form of positional bias where adults are unconsciously centred as the default social actors and decision-makers, shaping how society, institutions, and knowledge systems operate.

Consequently, the perspectives and experiences of children and young people are often undervalued, dismissed, or ignored.

Key features of adult centrism

Adults as the Norm: Adults’ views are considered standard, rational, and universal, while children's views are often seen as incomplete, naive, or irrelevant.
Authority and Power: Adults are assumed to know what is best for children, often without including children in decisions that directly affect them.
Knowledge Hierarchies: Children's knowledge is typically considered less valid or rigorous, especially in research, policy, or clinical settings.
Social Organization: Many systems (education, health care, legal structures) are designed to meet adult needs and operate on adult terms, often at the expense of children’s participation.
Adult centrism also leads to adultism: prejudice or discrimination against young people simply because they are young.

Adult Centrism also affects adults.
Just as patriarchy also impacts men, adult-centrism also shapes how adults experience the world.

How is adultism influencing your work?

July 29, 2025 at 8:57 AM

Julie Spray

@juliespray.bsky.social

It's hard to see what we're not seeing when working from the dominant or majority (normative) social position. As researchers, we share a normative but rarely critically considered position as ADULTS.

This means our research has likely been shaped by adult-centrism. I made a resource.

I consider my research ageless
Most or all of my participants are working-age adults
I consider research about children, youth or older-age people to be the subject of special niche scholarship, not mainstream to my discipline. I expect research involving children, youth or older-age people to be separate subfields.

Age variation within the adult age category is not part of my analysis
I do not specify the age or life stage of my participants when contextualising their stories or quotes
I don’t really consider how the perspectives of children, adolescents or older-age people might change my interpretations of adult participants’ experiences in my research

July 29, 2025 at 8:57 AM

Julie Spray

@juliespray.bsky.social

9. Law / Legal Studies
Legal Anthropology: A significant subfield of anthropology examines legal systems, customary law, and dispute resolution in diverse societies.

Influence on Critical Legal Studies: Anthropologists like Sally Falk Moore and John Comaroff have influenced critical legal theorists, particularly on how law operates outside formal institutions.

Critiques from Legal Scholars: Some legal scholars view anthropological work as lacking doctrinal precision or relevance to real-world jurisprudence. Others worry that anthropologists “romanticize” informal justice systems.

10. Geography
Shared Interests: Cultural geographers and anthropologists often study similar phenomena — place, landscape, identity, and spatial politics.

Methodological Exchange: There has been mutual borrowing of concepts like “place-making,” “territoriality,” and “embodiment.”

Critique: Some geographers argue anthropology can be insufficiently spatial in its analyses; others critique the discipline’s historical ties to colonial mapping and knowledge.

11. Education Studies
Anthropology of Education: This subfield explores schooling, learning, and pedagogy through ethnographic methods, often focusing on inequality, language, and hidden curricula.

Use in Teacher Training: Some education programs draw on anthropological insights about culture and learning styles to support inclusive pedagogy.

Skepticism: Quantitative educational researchers may see anthropology as too context-bound to inform policy or scalable interventions.

12. Public Health / Medicine
Medical Anthropology: Widely recognized for its critical insight into health systems, illness narratives, and global health.

Contributions: Anthropologists have illuminated issues around health inequality, medical pluralism, and the cultural meanings of disease.

Criticism: Biomedical practitioners may find anthropological critiques of “Western medicine” threatening or impractical, especially when they emphasize cultural relativism over measurable outcomes.

June 22, 2025 at 7:35 PM

Julie Spray

@juliespray.bsky.social

"What do other disciplines have to say about anthropology?" I asked ChatGPT... how accurate are these vibes?

chatgpt.com/share/68584c...

#epistemicrecognition #interdisciplinarity
#STS #anthropology #academia

1. Sociology
Overlap & Rivalry: Sociology and anthropology have long had a sibling rivalry. Sociologists have sometimes viewed anthropology as less rigorous or overly focused on "exotic" cultures.

Critiques: Especially in the mid-20th century, sociologists critiqued anthropology for lacking quantitative methods or generalizability.

Admiration: At the same time, many sociologists admire anthropology’s deep ethnographic insight and theoretical richness — especially in areas like symbolic interactionism, cultural sociology, and the sociology of knowledge.

2. History
Turn to Anthropology: In the 1970s and 80s, historians (especially cultural historians and those influenced by the “linguistic turn”) were heavily influenced by anthropologists like Clifford Geertz.

Mutual Enrichment: Historians appreciate anthropology’s attention to meaning, symbols, and context. Anthropological approaches helped redefine historical narratives about colonialism, race, and everyday life.

Critique: Some historians remain wary of presentism or interpretive leaps in anthropological work, especially when anthropologists use theory in ways that downplay archival evidence.

3. Political Science
Limited Uptake: Mainstream political science has often ignored anthropology due to its qualitative methods and contextual specificity.

Critical Political Science: However, critical scholars (especially in political theory, postcolonial studies, and development studies) use anthropological insights to critique the state, neoliberalism, and global governance.

Anthropology of the State: Work by anthropologists like James Ferguson and Akhil Gupta has influenced more nuanced understandings of power, bureaucracy, and development.

4. Economics
Mainstream Dismissal: Economists have traditionally seen anthropology as anecdotal or unscientific, due to its rejection of models, quantification, and predictive power.

Growing Interest: Some heterodox economists and behavioral economists are increasingly interested in anthropological work, particularly on informal economies, gift exchange, and non-market values.

Ethnographic Challenge: Economic anthropologists like David Graeber have explicitly critiqued economic theory from an anthropological angle, often with sharp effect.

5. Psychology
Cultural Psychology: This subfield is strongly influenced by anthropology, especially work on enculturation, emotion, and child development.

Tensions: Some psychologists criticize anthropology’s lack of replicability or hypothesis testing.

Shared Concerns: Both disciplines grapple with questions of universality vs. cultural specificity in human behavior.

6. Philosophy
Anthropology of Ethics: Philosophers (especially moral and political philosophers) have increasingly looked to anthropological work on ethics, relativism, and moral reasoning.

Anthropological Challenge: Philosophers sometimes find anthropological relativism threatening to normative arguments.

Interest in Practice: Some branches of philosophy (e.g. ordinary language philosophy, phenomenology) find resonance with anthropology’s attention to lived experience and social meaning.

7. Literary & Cultural Studies
Highly Engaged: These fields have been profoundly influenced by anthropology — especially structuralism, post-structuralism, and symbolic anthropology.

Mutual Exchange: Figures like Lévi-Strauss, Victor Turner, Mary Douglas, and later Clifford Geertz are frequently cited.

Criticism: Some scholars accuse anthropology of exoticism or insufficient self-reflexivity, although this is also a concern internal to anthropology itself.

8. Science and Technology Studies (STS)
Enthusiastic Dialogue: STS and anthropology have a strong and evolving relationship, particularly around ethnographies of science, laboratory life, and knowledge production.

Anthropologists in STS: Many STS scholars (e.g. Bruno Latour, Annemarie Mol) use ethnographic and anthropological methods extensively.

June 22, 2025 at 7:35 PM

Julie Spray

@juliespray.bsky.social

I have to give credit to the algorithms: my Bluesky feed is a beautiful thing

June 17, 2025 at 7:12 PM

Julie Spray

@juliespray.bsky.social

I think everyone in academia should buy and read this book, especially if you see this post and think it’s not relevant to you

March 17, 2025 at 9:40 AM

Julie Spray

@juliespray.bsky.social

Gosh I've been enjoying the enormous privilege of talking to scholars around the world and learning from their experiences of interdisciplinarity over their career for our Borderlands project. We are gonna make a badass book. Would you be interested in participating?

We are two anthropologists interested in how people’s disciplinary knowledge can be heard and understood, or conversely, misrecognised or silenced in interdisciplinary spaces (e.g. departments, committees, teams, projects). We are inviting PhD holders, globally, who have experience of interdisciplinary interactions to participate in our study via a Zoom interview. We would like to hear your stories and experiences of joys and pains in your interdisciplinary encounters so we can hear what hinders and helps different kinds of knowers and knowledges to be heard and find influence.

If you would be willing to be interviewed, we would love to hear from you! And before you say “oh I don’t really know if I have anything of value to contribute” please know that this is a very common response, we are looking to hear from people of all different backgrounds, roles, and degrees of engagement in interdisciplinary spaces, and there is value to us in everyone’s stories. We also know this can be a vulnerable or professionally sensitive topic—we’re in the same boat—and whatever you’re comfortable to share will be highly valued and treated with care and diligence. Please also feel free to share this invitation with your networks.

You can find more information at www.juliespray.com/borderlands or reach Julie at Julie.spray@universityofgalway.ie

January 21, 2025 at 2:36 PM

Julie Spray

@juliespray.bsky.social

I have a chapter in the new volume "Care and Coronavirus: Perspectives on Childhood, Youth and Family" based on comics I made with New Zealand children about their story of growing up in a pandemic.
bookstore.emerald.com/care-and-cor...

Children’s Care for Public Health and
Politically Expedient Care for Children
in Aotearoa New Zealand’s COVID-19
Pandemic
Julie Spray
Children’s Studies, University of Galway, Ireland
Abstract
Managing public ‘affect’ was a critical component of Aotearoa New Zealand’s
COVID-19 policy approach, which was predicated on collective
emotional feelings of calmness, compassion and trust. A long history of
health promotion efforts have involved co-opting children as tools to
manipulate (adult) public affect towards motivating behavioural change or
accepting health interventions. Little research has yet considered the consequences
of objectifying children for affect management in the name of
public health. The Pandemic Generation study compared the perspectives of
Auckland children aged 7–11, generated through co-drawing comics about
their pandemic experience, with a critical discourse analysis of children’s
representation in New Zealand COVID-19 public health messaging. In this
chapter, I argue that by leveraging performative care for children to
manipulate an adult public affect, the New Zealand government erased
children’s subjectivities, their care-giving roles and contributions, further
disenfranchising children as members of the ‘public’ in public health.

Fifi mostly heard about the pandemic from her mum, who would mention case numbers and things. She found lockdowns really hard. She missed going to school and seeing her friends. She could talk to them sometimes on Messenger kids when she had tablet time and they were online, but it wasn’t the same as being with them all day at school.

Fifi did a lot to protect herself and her family from Covid-19. She kept her mask hanging on the wall so she could remember it. Her 3-year-old sister would always remind the family to wash their hands. Fifi saw her mum looked tired and stressed when she came home from work and Fifi would comfort her. And Fifi got vaccinated. She said, “I looked at the needle and it wasn’t that big because I thought it would be bigger but it was only tiny.”

December 14, 2024 at 1:49 PM

Julie Spray

@juliespray.bsky.social

Updated list of modern moral panics, a reminder for the SCOTUS case today... 🏳️‍⚧️🧒

A Non-Exhaustive List of Modern Moral Panics

What patterns do you notice?

1920s Jazz music, Jazz vampires – Black men as sexually deviant, young white women as corrupted/deviant
1920s Flappers, petting parties - young white women as corrupted and sexually deviant
1930s Radio – New technologies corrupting youth
1940s Bobby soxers – Adolescent girls as sexually deviant
1940s-50s Comic books – Deviant subcultures corrupting youth
1950s Rock ‘n Roll – Black men as sexually deviant
1950s Widgies and Bodgies – Young people as morally corrupted
1960s Television - New technologies corrupting youth
1964 Mods and Rockers – Young people as deviant, criminals
1970s Save Our Children (from gay recruitment) (Anita Bryant) – Gay men as indoctrinating children
1970s Rock music – (backmasking) Musicians as satanic
1974 Poisoned Halloween candy – Child killers endangering innocent children
1976 Welfare Queens (Ronald Reagan) Black single mothers as deviant
1979-85 Dungeons and Dragons - Deviant subcultures corrupting youth
1970s-00s War on Drugs (Ronald Reagan) - Black people as criminals
1980s Disappearing Childhood - Commericalism/technologies corrupting childhood
1980s Satanic Panic – Preschool teachers as ritual satanist paedophiles
1985 Heavy metal (Tipper Gore) – Heavy metal musicians as satanic corruptors
1988-1990s HIV/AIDS – Gay men as sexually deviant
1980s-90s Crack babies - Black single mothers as deviant
2000s Rainbow parties – Adolescent girls as morally corrupted
2000s Video games - New technologies corrupting youth
2010s Child sex trafficking – Paedophiles endangering innocent children
2018 Tide Pods - Deviant subcultures corrupting youth
2020 Q Anon – Elite Democrats as satanic paedophiles
2020 LGBT Grooming Conspiracy – LGBT people as paedophiles endangering innocent children
2021 Critical Race Theory – Liberal teachers as child indoctrinators
2022 Drag Queen Story Hours – Gender non-conformists as corrupting innocent children
2024 Social media – New technolo…

December 4, 2024 at 5:46 PM

Julie Spray

@juliespray.bsky.social

a) no parent chooses not to feed their kids b) why wouldn’t it be the role of the state to support children when it was the state’s policies that put parents in this situation to begin with c) why spend more to have social services remove kids than it costs to support parents to support their kids?

November 28, 2024 at 1:31 PM

Julie Spray

@juliespray.bsky.social

Galway sky says TRANS RIGHTS

(@hatatheortan.bsky.social did the interpretation)

November 22, 2024 at 3:09 PM

Julie Spray

@juliespray.bsky.social

Looking forward to marking being over so I can get properly stuck into this new tome from the formidable Erica Burman. Child as method=how "the child" is used as a tool to serve heteropatriarchy, capitalism, imperialism, racism... and in my research, public health.

May 10, 2024 at 9:03 AM

Julie Spray

@juliespray.bsky.social

New paper birth announcement! Born 25/02/24 in Journal of Childhood Studies after a 2 year pregnancy and long labour, induced by wonderfully critical reviews (genuinely, so grateful for the pushing). Healthy 95 grams, 5 figures. Mother very proud; scars mostly healed journals.uvic.ca/index.php/jc...

Visual abstract: Shows a drawing of a woman drawing on the floor with a child. Text reads: What does it mean for researchers to speak in speech? We talk about "the child's voice"... What about denaturalising adult voices?

February 26, 2024 at 12:03 PM

Julie Spray

@juliespray.bsky.social

I curated this collective comic out of the check-in cards students did at the beginning of each class for my comics course. This is called "Being a Student in Ireland." I would like to highlight the potential of comics for researching and communicating lived experiences.

December 12, 2023 at 6:37 PM

Julie Spray

@juliespray.bsky.social

I had a go at drawing a commentary in comic form instead of ye old writing... here it is, published in NEOS Fall 2003 issue "Communication in the Worlds of Children and Youth: Imagination, Language, Performance, and Creative Expression." acyig.americananthro.org/neosvol15iss...

December 1, 2023 at 12:42 PM

Julie Spray

@juliespray.bsky.social

November 10, 2023 at 1:51 PM

Julie Spray

@juliespray.bsky.social

Comics, Childhood and the Alternative class, check-in/out cards, week 10 :

November 10, 2023 at 1:51 PM

Julie Spray

@juliespray.bsky.social

Chat GPT is overrated

October 28, 2023 at 5:25 PM

Julie Spray

@juliespray.bsky.social

An advance sharing: page 1 of the comic I made for Neos' forthcoming issue on Communication in the Worlds of Children and Youth: Imagination, Language, Performance, and Creative Expression

October 19, 2023 at 12:36 PM

Julie Spray

@juliespray.bsky.social

Students even left some impressions for me, when we recreated a recent argument using 6 randomly selected panel compositions (credit Nick Sousanis for the exercise). We are working on leaving our comfort zones & taking risks for growth. Only fair that I do it too, right?

October 4, 2023 at 1:43 PM

Julie Spray

@juliespray.bsky.social

Not only is my comics class getting brave enough to let other students see their drawings... (well, because I made them) ....today they practiced giving and receiving peer feedback "impressions" (in the sense of: "this aspect made an impression on me").

October 4, 2023 at 1:42 PM

Julie Spray

@juliespray.bsky.social

Introduce yourself with some jobs you have done apart from what you do now:

- Newspaper Delivery Girl
- Library Assistant (in change of the Saturday Rhymetime)
- Pub Poker Host (shout out to the Horse & Trap Mt Eden)
- Employment Consultant
- Stingray Wrangler