"Some
Brief Reflections on the Recent SHCY Conference in Baltimore"
Joe Austin
Department of Popular Culture, Bowling Green State University.
For those of us who have been holding our breath since the first
meeting at the Benton Foundation, hoping that something like
SHCY would become a viable scholarly organization, we can exhale
now. There are clearly enough scholars working and interested
in the history of children and youth to sustain a productive
and lively biennial meeting, and a significant number of those
scholars (if not the majority) at Baltimore were nearer to the
beginning of their careers – a sign that interest is probably
going to continue growing. How, then, to understand the next
stages of this organization? How can this interest be best sustained?
There were several answers to these questions implicitly suggested
in the Baltimore program. I want to highlight two: first, the
emergence of critical debates, and second, the cultivation of
interdisciplinary connections.
The theme of the conference itself raised a key debate in our
subfield: the role of the state in the creation-transformation
of different (often conflictual) constructions and practices
of “children” and “youth”. Almost every
panel contained papers on some aspect of public policy and/or
governmental practices. In my view, this points in at least
two directions. First, it raises a wide-ranging set of questions
and debates about the relationships between the welfare state
and the social-cultural status of children and youth. Specifically,
the panels left me wondering to what extent the major scholarly
categories of analysis in use are themselves artifacts of the
welfare state. That is, to what extents are such key terms as
“delinquency,” “teenage sexuality,”
and “ youth culture,” to name only a few, useful
or even applicable “outside” the historical contexts
of the welfare state? Second, questions about the state imply
the possibility for engagements beyond the ivy tower –
policy and practices can change, and scholars are not without
some authority in the public sphere, even if that authority
is not always as great as we would like. These two directions
are interconnected in the contemporary period, as the welfare
state continues to be dismantled. As the paper by Michael Willard
asked, who and what are “children and youth” if
and when a neoliberal/free-market framework predominates?
A
second series of debates were implicitly staged around the sources
for scholarly study; this is not a debate unique to our subfield,
of course. Any serious consideration of Gayatri Spivak’s
pivotal question, “Can the subaltern (children and youth,
among others) speak?” must be combined with questioning
ourselves: Can scholars (learn to) listen? There were frequent
calls in the conference papers to listen to children and youth
in their “own voice”. That children and youth have
left “traces” of their activities, their desires,
their thoughts, and their social lives is evident all around
us. The problem is not in finding “evidence” but
in deciding how the evidence we have can be usefully interpreted.
As several papers demonstrated, there are plenty of “unorthodox”
sources: photography, toys, media artifacts (film, comic books,
etc.), and memoirs, among others. To what extent do these sources
contain “the real voice” of children and youths?
What are the possibilities for new interpretative strategies
that open these sources in such a way that allows those “voices”
to emerge?
Finally, a significant body of work in our subfield has been
produced over the last three decades, enough to support the
publication of several very useful encyclopedias and a few synthetic
historical narratives connecting some aspects of the lives of
children and youth into a more or less coherent set of relationships.
We can expect more to follow. I would hope these would allow
us to (continue to) nest the debates in our subfield within
larger frameworks of historical-sociological-cultural analysis:
formations of the national and local state; globalization, migration,
and immigration; the evolutions of capitalist market relations;
the formation of the major social categories of individual and
group identities, such as race, ethnicity, gender, sex, religion,
region, and able-bodiedness. Studies of groups whose historical
trajectories of experience have differed significantly from
those of the majority or from the trends in nations other than
the United States are particularly important in this regard;
several of the papers in Baltimore demonstrated the usefulness
of considering and reflecting on these differences.
All
three of these debates place us into conversation with scholars
in other subfields, disciplines, or areas of intellectual production,
such as artists, social workers, and education scholars, all
of which were represented at the conference. This interdisciplinary
trend was most obvious in the excellent roundtable discussion
between historians and development psychologists. I strongly
encourage more roundtables of this type at future conferences.
We have no unique claim on the scholarship of children and youth.
As so many of the papers at the conference demonstrated, and
all of the debates mentioned above further suggest, we only
gain from expanding our boundaries beyond the discipline of
history to include other scholarly traditions and inquiries.
It is my hope that we will see this interdisciplinarity expand
even further at the Milwaukee conference in 2005.
