NEWSLETTER

Society for the History of Children and Youth

Reviewing the Fourth Biennial Conference of the
Society for the History of Children and Youth
Norrköping, Sweden

Ning de Coninck-Smith, Patrick Ryan
Bengt Sandin, and Judith Lind

In April 2006, at our first organizing meeting for the fourth biennial conference of the Society for the History of Childhood and Youth, the program committee struggled with our initial task - to find a title theme that could give the conference a consequential focus.  We settled on the innocuous, “In the Name of the Child.”  This less than memorable title did not stem from a lack of purpose, but a desire to signal to others that all work in the history of childhood and youth was welcome.  We hoped the title might suggest the problematic relationship between the act of speaking for children and searching for children’s voices in history.  We also held a less subtle understanding of the role of this conference and believed that holding it in Sweden promised to foster greater international, interdisciplinary, and interactive engagement among those studying childhood historically.  And our ambition was to create such a meeting. With the conference fresh in our memories, we would like to reflect upon how the event fared.  What has the Norrköping conference taught us about the possibilities and challenges of international, interdisciplinary engagement in the history of childhood and youth?

The first and most important lesson of this conference is unsurprising; holding it outside of the United States, along with the growth of the field, greatly diversified national representation in the program and therefore has (at least temporarily) internationalized our membership in one fell swoop.  At SHCY’s first conference in 2001, held in Milwaukee at Marquette University, and organized by Jim Marten, we numbered 78 participants of whom 7 came from outside the United States and Canada.  Four years later in 2005, the conference had grown to 112 participants, but mustered only six presenters working outside U.S. and Canadian institutions.  By contrast, in 2007 the majority (119 of 198) participants came from outside North America.  This was mostly a product of location, of course; forty-seven participants were Scandinavian (most of these Swedes), but there was a robust spread from the U.K. and Ireland (17), other European countries (37), Asia (10), and Australia and New Zealand (7).   An equally important fact was that the North American representation remained strong:  U.S. (67); Canada (12). 

We did, however, note some limits to this shift toward representation outside of North America.  First, all three of our plenary talks (though excellent in-and-of themselves) were centered on the British/Anglo-American world.  Second, we hoped for more participants from continental Europe, and unfortunately we garnered only one paper from Africa and only a few participants from all of Latin America.  It may be that factors outside of the Society’s control (such as differences in travel funding, shifts in the currency of childhood studies, and linguistic diversity) will continue to limit our reach or relevance in certain areas of the world.  It also could be that the annual International Standing Conferences for the History of Education, which sponsored a meeting on the history of childhood and youth in July of 2007, drew central Europeans away from our Norrköping event.  This conference was held in Hamburg, Germany and carried the title Children and Youth at Risk. Approaches in the history of education.  About 150 scholars, primarily from continental Europe, attended this conference.  The concurrence of these two highly successful conferences on the history of childhood is wonderful news for us, but it also signals the importance and potential benefits of collaboration with other organizations.  The scope of the success in Sweden has opened a window of opportunity and demonstrated the feasibility of the Society’sinternational aspirations.  It remains to be seen whether we will be able to sustain this over a series of years in a way that might allow us to construct a robust and permanent transnational intellectual dialogue in our field of study. It will be important in the future to seek ways to financially support cooperation participants for other parts of the world as well as to seek closer cooperation with other international organizations that have an interest in the history of childhood to attain a greater degree of visibility.

Whether the international diversity present in the 2007 conference created fruitful dialogue among participants across national boundaries is a more complex issue.  We all had our own experiences at the conference.  The committee tried to facilitate engagement in a number of ways.  We purposely internationalized panel composition by signaling the value of this in the call for papers, by matching single paper proposals on topical (rather than national) grounds, and by whom we recruited to serve as chairs and discussants.  As a result, all but one of the fifty sessions included content from or participants residing in more than one nation state.  We also tried to encourage participants to approach their papers and sessions in new ways.  We repeatedly asked chairs and presenters to uphold shorter time-limits on paper presentation in order to open more time in the sessions for discussion, questions, and debate.  If presenters followed the time restrictions, they very likely could not read whole papers.  Thus, the conference provided a secure site online where registered participants could exchange papers.  We encouraged participants to do some reading in advance, and to present their research findings in a more conversational mode based on the knowledge that the text was available to all.  The online paper exchange was a success if judged by the fact that almost all papers were submitted to it, and most papers where downloaded by 15 and 35 times. A few papers were downloaded up to 80 times. We certainly hope (this will be done again) that the next conference can create a similar system. 

Looking over the papers it was clear the a substantial number of papers could be clustered around common themes as child labor, culture - visualization of childhood, normalcy and guidance, education, children and war, children and sexuality, children’s bodies, children and space/geographies  etc.  These naturally also became partial names of sessions.  These clusters may indicate the beginning of separate lines of interest within the history of childhood; it is a differentiated scholarly field with diverse methodologies and theoretical aspirations. As a consequence it is clear that the field as such has a special potential to relate to other disciplines that have a vested interest in children; use theory and methods otherwise foreign to some historical traditions.  We chose not to mark these clusters especially in the program, as sub networks, because we wanted to encourage interaction and a commitment to the development for the whole field as such.  However, the facilitation of a more discussion-centered academic culture through the implementation of stricter time-limits was only partially successful in our estimation.  The tradition of reading one’s paper is well entrenched; and depending on the quality of the reading, it has its merits.  It is obvious that there is more than one best way to organize a session, but we think more emphasis on discussion and exchange is merited in the future.

The challenge of creating an interactive environment at the conference was complicated by our overall success, and the way the Program Committee responded to it.  Should we have squeezed 198 papers into four days, which resulted in 17 panels (1 out of 3) with four papers and left too little time for discussion, or should we have turned more applicants away?  Do we need some truly “working” sessions built around the discussion and debate of major theoretical or methodological questions which the whole community should attend?  Though we are grateful to all our round-table discussants, did we schedule too many; was there too much concurrent competition from ordinary sessions?  Would it be possible to create seminars designed not around the presentation of work, but as an attempt to articulate areas of study where we think more work is needed?  A session where the outcome is a list of ideas on the blackboard after two hours discussion among participants and audience might be something to consider in the future.  These are questions for the next Program Committee to confront, but it is clear from this conference that history of childhood and youth is growing up. 

Our hope for greater interdisciplinary exchange through the conference was the most forbidding of our goals, and it is the one where we believe there is room for the most improvement.  The Program Committee received many great panel proposals, but they tended to be rooted in one discipline or even one field of a discipline, with some notable exceptions.   It appears to us that social history is predominant among our members, with smaller representation from intellectual and cultural history, gender studies, media studies and ethnography, and the sociology of childhood.  We had very little representation from scholars working from the perspective of critical psychology, the geography of childhood, or work directly appealing to current questions in public policy, politics, or the law.  This is not surprising given SHCY’s origins, and since most of us work in departments organized around specific disciplines.  Yet it seems to us that the history of childhood, including the line of work that has developed within social history itself, is precisely the sort of enterprise that should be concerned with what scholars in other disciplines are saying about children and youth.  Though this is easier said than done, we also believe that our work should have relevance for how the current politics and cultures of childhood our understood.  On this count, the conference session on youth, media, and violence grabbed front-page headlines, complete with a large photograph in a local paper.  Unfortunately, the article did not adequately convey the debate within the session over the sources of violence to and by young people, but simply reduced the problems of violence and youth to a product of recent video games.  On this issue we can not offer much in the way of a positive advice except to repeat Paula Fass’ call (her 2005 keynote address to the Society)that we continue to think creatively, to research and to write in ways to challenge our insulation from a wider scholarly, and even a public discourse on childhood.

We would be remiss, if we failed to acknowledge the extraordinary quality of this conference’s social agenda and the extravagant support we all enjoyed from Linköping University and the City of Norrköping as well as The Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Foundation. SHCY also found means to give some support some participants, and the old textile mills in the centre of Norrköping, now housing the university of Linköping proved to be a wonderful venue for the conference. The meeting was graced with several fine meals and even a wonderful student choir.  There were two well attended tours: a walk through Norrköping’s industrial district accompanied by an amusing dramatic performance and an excursion to the home of Ellen Key.  The Key’ tour was complemented by stunning lakeside scenery, the viewing of a prominent medieval rune stone, visiting a sixteenth-century castle and a cathedral dome from the Middle-Ages at Vadstena; all of this laced with interesting commentary on Swedish political history.  From the social perspective this conference, we feel, was permeated by a close, collegial atmosphere; it was wonderful, engaging – and exhausting at the same time.  We have received many very positive appraisals of the conference expressing such opinions. There can be no doubt that lasting friendships were being formed and maintained through these experiences. 

In sum: SCHY has come a long way since its conceptualization in 2000 in Washington, D.C., and its founding in 2001 in Milwaukee.  We currently boast over 200 dues paying members; and our list on H-Net, H-Childhood (est. 1998), links together 730 childhood historians from all over the world.  The recent establishment of a peer-reviewed journal, The Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth, is a crowning achievement.  This year’s conference in Sweden was easily our most international, and we passed important constitutional changes to require international representation on our executive board.  We utilized interactive technologies to mutual benefit, and the facilities and social events of this conference will be difficult to beat.  Yet, building a locus for an internationally engaged interdisciplinary study of the history of childhood is a significant challenge, and future advancement will require a self-conscious, concerted effort.  We will need to continue to reach out to organizations of scholars with origins outside of the United States, and to think of creative ways to make SHCY the international, interdisciplinary, and interactively engaged scholarly community which we believe it can become.