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The following text introduces the story of the siblings Walter, Georg and Dora Benjamin, who understood childhood as a topic of interest, training, performance and theoretical production. Walter sees childhood as a philosophical perspective for a critique of culture, sensitive to children's actions and language; Georg, as a pediatrician, school doctor and deputy, takes childhood as a health emergency for the formulation of public policies; and Dora weaves a strong sociological analysis of the binomial women/children crossed by the work relations transferred from the textile industry to the domestic environment. These are just a few nuances of the Benjamin siblings' multifaceted relationship with the theme of childhood. Born at the end of 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries, they lived through the oscillation of German politics and economy, the hardships of the First World War, the rise and consolidation of Nazism which forced them, due to their Jewish origins and intellectual condition, to undergo displacement, imprisonment, illness and death. A significant part of Walter's production was saved when he deposited his writings in libraries or sent copies to friends. Georg and Dora, who were more closely linked to the communist party, did not achieve the same success, and most of their vast production was destroyed in the book bonfires perpetrated by the Nazis. This has resulted in a silencing of their history and their vast intellectual production, which is now considered visionary-a silence that denounces the policies of exception dedicated to history's erasure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Methodology Dwells on the Topic: childhood and culture in research1. The following text discusses the relevance of the subject in the research activity, specifically when the construction of a methodology is concerned considering that Human and Social Studies are indeed discursive science and the interlocutors' voices - researcher and child - have been central to methodological construction. The text purpose is to broaden such debate, shifting the focus to a third crucial element in this otherness constitution that, very often, is considered apart from the methodology: the topic. The discussion is made from the analysis of five researches in the interdisciplinary field of childhood studies and based on philosophy of the language by Walter Benjamin and also Mikhail Bakhtin and Valentin Volochnov's circle. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present text has as a main goal to discuss the relations between childhood and contemporary culture. More so, that the social space the children occupy in the cyberculture became a very contradictory one: for in one hand we see such children with a natural inborne expertise; and on the other hand, we see them as unprotected and fragile beings. It is an attempt of delimitating and having a closer approach of a subject of research in a constant process of transformation, with cultural, psychic and social changes that are involved, that affects the way of producing knowledge and the research itself. It demands then a methodological and theoretical construct in a constant and vertiginous process, that more than counting on the knowledge historically accumulated seems to be diving into a vortex at the crossroads of ours incertitude. The line of reasoning we intend to partake with the reader, begins initially with the data research of the production of arguments on the children's relations with the internet that go around their daily routine and the researches of academical and official nature. On a second instance, we look into the market's discursive production in order to observe how the making of sites, targeted specifically to childrens, relates itself with prerrogatives of such specialized knowledge. At last but not at least, we show a philosophical approach of such speeches sustained metaforically by the homeric narrative and Franz Kafka's reading of Ulisses'encounter at the mermaid's island. Through this path we intend to analyze tendencies that emerge from the production of knowledge about childhood and cyberculture and, altogether, to think on the ethical and methodological challenges that such subject imposes to childhood's researchers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]