Childism and History
Wednesday March 27th, 2024, 9:00 – 10:30 am US ET
Note: US has already set clocks forward, so it starts e.g. 1:00 pm GMT; 2:00 pm CET; 6:30 pm IST
3:00 pm IST (Israel Standrad Time)
Patriarchy in the form of adultism is deeply rooted in history. Across a diversity of times, places, cultures, and social systems, adulthood (in similar ways to masculinity, Whiteness, heterosexism, and so on) has come to represent a normative humanity. This colloquium is the start of a project that aims to develop childist readings of history that both deconstruct its embedded adultism or age biases and lift up ways that children and adults have sought children’s structural empowerment.
To this end, the colloquium explores possible connections between historical research and the critical lens of childism. While historical research has increasingly attended to children’s lived experiences, agency, and voices, it also needs to examine the underlying structural norms by which children are marginalized and/or empowered in the first place.
Presenters respond to the following questions:
Can the lens of childism be helpful for historical research? That is, can placing children at the center of inquiry change broader understandings of history and/or historical scholarship?
What, if anything, might distinguish childist approaches from other work in the history of childhoods?
What might childism offer to historical research that complements other critical perspectives such as feminism, anti-racism, disabilities studies, and decolonialism?
Program (in US ET)
9:00 – 9:10 am: Introduction (John Wall)
9:10 – 10:00 am: Panel Presentations (10 minute each)
Anna Mae Duane, Professor of English, University of Connecticut, United States, with expertise in 19th century US literature and race (website)
Sivan Balslev, Lecturer in Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel, with expertise in modern Iranian childhoods and gender (website)
Elena Jackson Albarrán, Associate Professor of History and Global and Intercultural Studies, Miami University, United States, with expertise in Latin American and Cold War childhoods (website)
Julie Reuss, Postdoc in Modern History, University of Bayreuth, Germany, with expertise in kinship, sexuality, and deviance in the Federal Republic of Germany (website)
Ishita Pande, Professor of History, Co-Convener of Global History Initiative, Queens University, Canada, with expertise in age and sex in post/colonial South Asia (website)
10:00 – 10:30 am: Open Discussion