NEWSLETTER
Society for the History of Children and Youth
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No. 12 |
Summer 2008 |
Recently Completed
Dissertations and Dissertations in Progress The dissertation citations and abstracts contained here are published with permission of Proquest Information and Learning. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by addressing your request to:
“Naughty Child: The Racial Politics of Sentimental Discipline in Selected U.S. Antebellum Texts” by Sophia R. Bell, Ph.D., Tufts University, 2008. This dissertation joins recent interrogations of sentiment's racial logic by addressing naughty child-figures who appear in selected U.S. antebellum texts. In Catharine Maria Sedgwick's Hope Leslie , William Apess's Son of the Forest , Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter , Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin , and Harriet Wilson's Our Nig , these children resist adult attempts to make them adhere to disciplinary regimes of domesticity, literacy, and Christian conversion. Child-figures are used by white authors to articulate often unconscious racial views and by writers of color to expose U.S. racism. I argue that the particular blend of sentimental pathos and minstrel entertainment made naughty childhood a vehicle for articulating tentative, and often deeply problematic, sympathy between whites and people of color from Indian Removal until abolition. Chapter One, "Manifest Sympathy: Indian Removal and Childhood Naughtiness in Catharine Maria Sedgwick's Hope Leslie and William Apess's A Son of the Forest ," depicts the naughty child's entrance onto the sentimental stage in the 1820s as authors explore Jacksonian "Indian-hating" from a child's point of view. Chapter Two, "Misreading The Scarlet Letter : Racial Masquerade and Hawthorne's Naughty Child," maintains that Hawthorne depicts his naughty white girl, Pearl, in terms that invoke both Indian dispossession and African-American enslavement. In Chapter Three, "Mixed Feelings: Naughty Children and the Limits of Sentimental Discipline in Uncle Tom's Cabin ," I argue that Stowe's Topsy demonstrates sentimental reliance on a minstrel aesthetic to supplement contradictory racial "sympathies." Finally, in Chapter Four, "Naughty Girl/'Knotty Queries': Interrogating Sentimental Racism in Harriet Wilson's Our Nig ," I discuss Harriet Wilson's sharp rebuke to sentimental racism as a naughty black child suffers so palpably that the novel's white sentimentalists become apologists for sadism. After the Civil War, literary naughty children relocate from the heart of domestic space to the frontiers of empire. My project finds that by containing interracial sympathies to youth and converting concern for people of color into concern for white children, the interracial alliances imagined in these texts never came of age. “Who Was Eligible? The Public Education of Children and Youth with Disabilities in Regular Classrooms in China From 1986 to 2006” by Fengming Cui, Ed.D., Boston University, 2008. This study examined the legal rights and the status of children and youth with disabilities in regular classrooms in compulsory education from 1986 to 2006 in China. By doing this, the author gathered evidence and provided recommendations for changes to benefit children with disabilities and improve the public education system in China. This study employed document analysis methodology reviewing laws and administrative regulations, and official publications and reports regarding Learning in the Regular Classrooms (LRC). Focusing data collection on primary documents, this study provides a historical perspective. The findings indicated that legislative barriers obstructed the education of students with disabilities in regular schools and classrooms. Twenty percent of reported children and youth with these three disabilities categories did not receive education. Students with disabilities and special needs other than hearing impairments, visual impairments, and mental retardation did not have legal rights for special or assistive accommodations and service. Disparities in education between municipalities and rural areas and developed and underdeveloped areas remained substantial. Ineffective administrative practices in LRC did not meet the aspirations and goals for implementing LRC. Problems in data collection and reporting prevented a better understanding of the academic status of children and youth with disabilities in public education. Recommendations contained strategies for a radical political and cultural change in the education system if the people of China are to have effective protection of human rights for citizens with disabilities enrolled in pubic education. “The Influence of Attachments to Childhood Caregivers, Peers and Romantic Partners on Attachment to the Divine” by Deborah Anne Engelbrecht, Ph.D., University of Missouri - Kansas City, 2007. A mixed methods research design and an interdisciplinary perspective were used to study the influence of attachments to childhood caregivers, peers, and romantic partners on attachment to the divine. The influence of attachment relationships on affect was also investigated. The use of the attachment paradigm to study relationship to the divine facilitated the measurement of relationship to god as both an individual (view of self) and a social (view of others) experience. First, questionnaires completed by 166 university students between the ages of 18 and 25, were completed. Later, personal interviews were completed with 12 participants. Analysis of questionnaire data suggests that personal anxiety in retrospective relationship with childhood caregivers predicts personal anxiety in relationship with the divine. On the other hand, the perception of childhood caregivers as less "religious" and avoidance of closeness with childhood caregivers are the best predictors of avoidance of closeness to the divine. Attachment regression analysis controlled for age of participant, childhood trauma, and current stress. Although additional information regarding gender, racial/ethnic group, current living situation, current relationship status, socioeconomic group, religious affiliation, and religious service attendance was gathered, preliminary statistical analyses indicated none of these variables had a consistent statistically significant impact on attachment to the divine. Comfort with closeness to childhood caregiver was the strongest predictor of positive affect. Personal anxiety in relationships with peers and romantic partners was the best predictor of negative affect. Interview data used to supplement quantitative results, accentuated the transitional nature of relationships during the developmental period of young adulthood. This research supported previous research regarding the influence of childhood caregiver attachment on attachments formed later in life including attachment to the divine. The influence of caregiver model of "religiousness" on attachment to the divine was supported. It also expanded the understanding of relationship to the divine as an individual and social experience. Results support using mixed methods designs when investigating attachment, religious/spiritual variables, and affect. “Domestic Play: Order, Control, and British Identity, 1860—1920” by Michelle Patricia Beissel Heath, Ph.D., The George Washington University, 2008. This dissertation explores the Victorian discourse of play and playfulness, showing that play not only reflects Victorian beliefs, values, attitudes, and responses, but helped shape and direct them. Situating its analysis within various strains of literary and cultural criticism, the study traces responses to the then-burgeoning arena of sport and games though both literary and historical texts (novels, children's literature, periodicals, sports newspapers, and games and conduct manuals). It shows that neither novel nor manual lived in a world devoid of the other, and that what surfaces in a novel is frequently taken from the discourse of games or shapes a later discussion of a game in a manual. The study examines ways in which play intersected with nearly every aspect of Victorian life, but focuses in particular on the ways in which sports and games affected the home and domestic life, and helped to shape Victorian and later Edwardian familial, domestic, and imperial identities. It argues against ideas put forth by those like James Kincaid, who suggests that controls and order do not exist in play. Issues of order and control, consequence and connection, this study suggests, do arise persistently at sites of play, as do issues of race, class, gender, and age. Ultimately, this study considers ways in which sports and games are used to explore the possibility of social or individual freedom, are used as social equalizers between races, classes, genders, and ages, but are at the same time considered with much anxiety, are the sites of cultural tension and discomfort about those very freedoms and equalities. This is evident in nineteenth and early twentieth century children's texts and texts about childhood through the incompatibility of domesticity and play, and it is evident in adult texts of the same period by those texts' continual striving to correct balances, whether those balances be between playfulness and seriousness, or between identity markers such as race, class, and gender. “Making African-American Childhood: Chicago, 1915—1945” by Moira Elizabeth Hinderer, Ph.D., The University of Chicago, 2007. Increasingly over the course of the twentieth century, African-American children have been honored as innocents and martyrs, while simultaneously condemned as the dangerous victims of race restriction. This dissertation explores the intersections between these ideas about Black childhood and the lived experiences of young African Americans and their families in Chicago between 1915 and 1945. Beginning in the first decades of the twentieth century, Chicago became a central place for the intensive study of Black children, the production of a material and leisure culture of Black childhood, and the location of a series of experiments in interracial child training. Close attention to sites of childhood such as homes, schools, playgrounds, and institutions allows me to re-theorize how practices of racial discrimination and exclusion were produced largely outside of the law in twentieth-century Chicago. By examining the shifting images of Black children, I also suggest a new lineage for ideas of urban crisis, tracing the roots of these ideas to the protests of Black artists and activists. The interwar years reveal a distinct shift in the public display of child images, from representations of Black child innocence to those of suffering and anger. This change illustrates the multiple strategies employed to challenge racial discrimination in Chicago. In the 1920s, Black professionals and community activists used children to promote concepts of community autonomy and respectability, revealing both intraracial conflict and coalition. By the end of the 1930s, Black visual artists, writers, and journalists were producing images of the poverty, suffering, and rage of urban Black children and youth, representations designed to signal the threats posed to the nation by continuing racial inequality. Wartime concerns created a national audience for these ideas, and Chicago became the site of experiments to train young people in interracial friendship. These experiments exposed the malleability of race learning, and both the boldness and the naiveté of racial experiments. While adults sought to protect and shape children, the young people discussed in this dissertation were also actors in their own lives, people for whom youth could never be a category apart from political life. “When Children Are Left behind: The Perceptions of West Indian Adolescents Separated from Their Mothers During Childhood Due to Migration, and the Effects of This Separation on Their Reunification” by Dadrene Hine-St. Hilaire, Ph.D., New York University, 2008. This qualitative study describes the experiences of West Indian adolescents who have had prolonged separation from their mothers during childhood and are later reunited with their mothers in the United States. The mothers all immigrated to find employment when their children were young. Twelve adolescents (10 females and 2 males), and ten mothers received an initial interview and a second follow-up interview using an interview guide. Age at separation ranged from infant to eight years while age at reunion ranged from eight to eighteen years. The years of separation ranged from five and a half to eleven years. The interviews were transcribed and analyzed for categories and themes. The data was organized into the following categories: age and length of separation, childcare during separation, safety before and after reunion, father's involvement, extended family involvement and support, communication and relationships, abandonment issues, emotions, attachment, expectations for reunion and future plans. The results of this study suggest that the adolescents' length of separation, their age at separation, age at reunion, experience during separation, and quality of childcare during separation, all affected their ability to adapt to life in the United States and on their long-term relationship with their mothers. The findings also highlight the importance of supportive extended family relationships to the survival of these children. “Materializing Childhood: An Historical Archaeology of Children in Roman Egypt” by Karen J. Johnson, Ph.D., University of Michigan, 2007. This dissertation investigates the material culture of childhood and the social category of "child" through an examination of artifacts from nonmortuary contexts. These data come from the Egyptian town of Karanis during its Roman occupation, from the first through fifth centuries CE. The research design is built around theory and methods from archaeology, anthropology, psychology, philology, and history. There are physical, biological, behavioral, and cognitive features of the period known as childhood---here, children from roughly 3--12 years of age. The social construction of childhood is also recognized, particularly in studies on the history of the family. In addition to addressing the seminal work of Philippe Ariès, there is a survey of Roman literary and documentary sources focusing on such topics as childhood as a distinct stage of life, children at play, and children at work. To explore the integration of historical and archaeological sources, the topic of literacy and education in Roman Egypt are both addressed. This is critical for designing an historical archaeological approach: to appreciate the value and power of writing and words in the past, not just to appreciate what they offer us as sources today. These discussions are then brought to bear on the archaeological and historical context for Karanis. After reviewing key concepts from previous chapters and problems inherent to the site data, this dissertation turns to constructing a typology of children's material culture, which revolves around the notion of play or pretense, a concept that also happens to include adult activities. This highlights the fact that agency is a crucial notion when considering artifacts. In order to reconstruct a sense of children's experiences at Karanis, the discussion moves to incorporate elements from research on the Roman census in Egypt as a means for highlighting population dynamics at large and the demographic realities of childhood in a high mortality regime. Additionally, the developmental and sociological characteristics of the playthings from Karanis are explored. Overall, an interdisciplinary approach to the subject of children and childhood is offered in the hope of stimulating further work on the topic. “Growing Up Soviet: Childhood in the Soviet Union, 1918—1958” by Ann Livschiz, Ph.D., Stanford University, 2007. This dissertation is an investigation into the history of Soviet childhood, and the evolution in the relationships between the state and children, between children and parents, and among children themselves. While examining childhood as a crucial site for the development of Soviet identity from the Russian revolution through the early phases of the post-Stalinist thaw, my dissertation also analyzes the process of accommodation and negotiation that took place in the process of the development of that identity, particularly its transformation through each successive generation in the period from 1918 to 1958. The dissertation shows, among other things, that by the 1930s the Soviet state was consciously creating a class system in some ways reminiscent of tsarist Russia; that it created a rural-urban schism and used World War II to codify that class system; that it deviated from its own revolutionary creed by increasingly emphasizing gender divisions; that after the 1920s the state realized it must accept the existence of families, then attempted to use children to inculcate and control parents; and it helped create and perpetuate poverty but blamed amoral, unpatriotic, and impoverished citizens for their plight while refusing to admit poverty's existence. The examination of four decades of childhood's institutions--specially families, school systems, detdoms , and the Young Pioneers--demonstrates that state officials were fairly consistent in altering the Revolution's populist goal for their own ends. But while that might be an unsurprising revelation, the fact that children and parents were aware of doctrinal changes and negotiated and protested them shows a surprisingly complex citizenship. This dissertation uses children- and parent-created sources to illustrate their responses to the various troublesome dictates, from letters to children's books writers to records of local party meetings to childhood memoirs. The dissertation's title, "Growing Up Soviet," is a reference to the complexity of the negotiation process--children were maturing and seeking to define themselves at the same time the Soviet Union, an entity that lasted only a full human lifetime, was coming of age. “Reforming the Child: Childhood, Citizenship, and Subjectivity in Contemporary China” by Orna Naftali, Ph.D., University of California, Santa Barbara, 2007 Since the early 1980s, government, academic, and media bodies in China have been attempting to advance so-called "modern," "scientific," and "humanistic" approaches to childrearing and education. This thesis traces the production and reception of China's new pedagogical discourses while examining the links between changing notions of childhood, shifting configurations in the idea of the "public" and the "private," and recent mutations in the relationship between the state and the citizen in China of the reform era (1978-present). Based on 11 months of ethnographic fieldwork among parents and teachers in the city of Shanghai, and on a survey of a wide range of Chinese-language sources, this study argues that a new notion of the child--as an enterprising, autonomous individual with rights--has been emerging in contemporary China. A product of China's increasing openness to the world and its re-integration within the global market economy in the past several decades; of the One-Child family policy; and of ongoing changes in the governing logic of the socialist state, this new vision of the child is nonetheless fraught with tensions and contradictions. Specifically, the thesis finds that while the Chinese government has been promoting a "neo-liberal" conception of the child and the citizen, it is simultaneously advancing authoritarian, collectivist notions of childrearing and education, grounded in both a Confucian ethos and in an attenuated socialist agenda. The study further reveals that in negotiating these new, conflicting requirements, Chinese teachers and parents, whose existing notions of childhood have been shaped by their professional, class, and historical habitus , at times resist and often actively transform this post-Maoist vision of the child, thereby redefining the meaning of childhood, citizenship, and subjectivity in contemporary China. “The Ideology of the Child in Japan, 1600—1945” by Lizbeth Halliday Piel, Ph.D., University of Hawai'i at Manoa, 2007. Japan's modernization changed the way in which Japanese writers, educators and moralists viewed children and childhood. Although Edward Morse and other Western visitors in the 1870s saw Japan as "the paradise for children," Japanese reformers, such as Ueki Emori and Fukuzawa Yukichi, criticized 'traditional' childhood and family life, and turned to the West for alternative models. The resulting 'modern ideology of the child' in Japan is a product of discourse and debate that was motivated by the search for a national identity between 1868 and 1945. Meiji-period (1868-1912) advocates for the protection of children were seeking liberation from the perceived backwardness of Tokugawa (1600-1868) family values and the patriarchal family system. Taishô-period (1912-1926) intellectuals used the image of the child as a trope to criticize statism and call for individual rights. Prewar Shôwa (1926-1945) revisionists rediscovered Tokugawa family values to argue for a modernity that was culturally Japanese, not Western. Over time, government policy and community attitudes changed towards childrearing, education, adoption practices, child labor and child prostitution. This dissertation tracks the changing image of the child, mainly through children's literature, or the literature of the 'childlike mind' ( dôshin ), but also through Romantic literature and treatises on early childhood education, child welfare, family structure and family law. Thinkers discussed in this work include Philippe Ariès, Karatani Kôjin, Kaibara Ekken, Nakae Tôju, Kitahara Hakushû, Ogawa Mimei, Wakamatsu Shizuko, Yanagita Kunio, Hatano Kanji and others. “Radical Relations: A History of Lesbian and Gay Parents and Their Children in the United States, 1945—2003” by Daniel Winunwe Rivers, Ph.D., Stanford University, 2007. Radical Relations: A History of Lesbian and Gay Parents and Their Children in the United States, 1945 to 2003 charts the changing experiences of lesbian and gay parents in the United States from the Second World War to the present and chronicles their struggle for recognition in American society. It argues that by forging new kinds of family and childrearing relations, gay and lesbian parents successfully challenged legal and cultural frameworks that defined the family as heterosexual and paved the way for the contemporary focus on family and domestic rights in lesbian and gay political movements. Based on archival research in New York, Seattle, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, complemented by over a hundred interviews, Radical Relations traces five decades of gay and lesbian family history. The first chapter looks at the pressure on lesbians and gay men in the pre liberation era to marry and have children, the double lives many lesbian and gay parents lived, and the constant threat of estrangement from their children faced by those who left their marriages. Chapter Two shows that this period of intense fear and repression nonetheless held the promise of changes to come. It looks at lesbian mothers raising children in butch/femme and bohemian communities and at the roots of lesbian and gay parental activism in the homophile groups of the era. Chapter Three examines the court battles that erupted in the gay and lesbian liberation era as lesbian mothers and gay fathers left previous heterosexual relationships and faced difficult custody battles. Chapters Four and Five look at lesbian mother activist groups and gay father groups of the 1970s, and chapter six explores the experiences of lesbian mothers and their children growing up in lesbian feminist communities of the 1970s and 1980s. Chapter Seven looks at the expansion of lesbian and gay parental relationships in the 1980s and 1990s facilitated by insemination, adoption and surrogacy and the vibrant growth in LGBT family rights groups. It shows how lesbian and gay parenting came to be a central focus of the modern LGBT civil rights movement by the 1990s. “Pyre: A Poetics of Fire and Childhood in the Art of Henry Darger” by Leisa Rundquist, Ph.D., The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2007. Art making for Henry Darger is a recovery of childhood vision with eyes wide open. At the heart of this vision lie the language of fire and the language of childhood, both possessing primal natures too unpredictable and protean to control completely. Fire and childhood reign in Darger's imagination as icons of instability--mutable and bewitching catalysts pressing and exceeding the boundaries of description and possibility. Previous scholarship interprets Darger's visual work in three frames: one, purely narrative, reflecting only the written text of the Realms of the Unreal ; two, a Freudian analysis disclosing the artist's childhood; and three, a paradigm of outsider art. The chapters that shape Pyre acknowledge the value of these interpretive frames, finding their analyses both useful and problematic in revealing meaning in Darger's art. Pyre broadens current scholarship through inclusive and interdisciplinary modes--reading Darger's artistic production as a personal mythology filtering and re-interpreting culture. Accordingly, this reading forges new perspectives antithetical to the dominant conceptual model of the solipsistic "outsider artist." As a visual artist, Darger conveys moments beyond description through vacillating knowns and unknowns. He wields fiery tropes and narratives bringing forth flame's vast ability to stimulate reveries of generation, animation, sexuality, desire, spiritual passion, and destruction. Pyre locates these potent manifestations in couplings of fire and little girls, asserting that, within this striking duo, Darger relays the wealth of his art's emotional investment, spiritual aspirations, and erotic tensions. Pyre considers the range of fiery metaphor and visible flame within the allure of panoramic spectacle, within combinations and re-combinations of girl-bodies, within the invocations of childhood innocence and Catholic religiosity, and within the undercurrents of heated desire that unfurl into excesses of poetics and meaning. Returning time and again to flame's mercurial manifestations, Pyre reveals the elusive transmissions and irresolvable tensions that drive Darger's Realms of the Unreal and locates circuits through which his project, created in a space of privation, openly converses with visual culture and the historical milieu of Darger's time. Dissertations In Progress Dissertator: Sheila Marie Aird, Howard University Dissertator: Jonathan Anuik, University of Saskatchewan Dissertator: Megan E. Birk, Perdue University Dissertator: Ellen Boucher, Columbia University Dissertator: Amanda Brian, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign Dissertator: Kathryn Bridge, Victoria University Dissertator: Tarah Brookfield, York University Dissertator: Michael Carriere, University of Chicago Dissertator: Daphne R. Chamberlain, University of Mississippi Dissertator: Robin
Chapdelaine, Rutgers University Dissertator: Jessa Chupik, McMaster University Dissertator: Caroline Collinson, The Ohio State University Dissertator: Jason Ellis, York University, Toronto Dissertator: Jia-Chen Fu, Yale University Dissertator: Diana Georgescu,
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign Dissertator: Kevin L. Gooding, Purdue University Dissertator: David Greenspoon,
Penn State University Dissertator: Justus G. Hartzok, University of Iowa Dissertator: Bryn Varley Hollenbeck, University of Delaware Dissertator: Daniel Lee, University of California, Berkeley Dissertator: Karen Lucas, University of California, Berkeley Dissertator: Leslie Miller, University of Georgia Dissertator: Rachel Neiwert, University of Minnesota Dissertator: Wee Siang
Margaret Ng, McGill University Dissertator: Claire O'Brien, University of Southern Illinois, Carbondale Dissertator: Okezi Otovo, Georgetown University Dissertator: Stacey Patton,
Rutgers University Dissertator: Jessie B. Ramey, Carnegie Mellon University Dissertator: Andrew Ruis, University of Wisconsin, Madison Dissertator: Carrie T. Schultz, Boston College Dissertator: Michal Shapira, Rutgers University Dissertator: Jennifer Sovde, Indiana University Dissertation title: “Onontio's Children: French Detroit's Native Community” Advisor: James L Axtell Dissertator: Jennifer Tappan, Columbia University Dissertation title: “A Healthy Child Comes from a Healthy Mother: Mwanamugimu and Nutritional Science in Uganda, 1935-73” Advisor: Marcia Wright Dissertator: Alexis Tinsley, Brandeis University Dissertator: Rachel Villarreal, University of Arizona Dissertator: Charles Wash, Howard University Dissertator: Kelly Whitmer, British Columbia University © Society for the History of Children and Youth, 2008 Contributors to Newsletter #12 or Return to Table of Contents |