News
From the Field, II: A Review
of Recent and Forthcoming Conferences
Janet
Golden and David Pomfret, Editors
In
case you missed them: The
last twenty-four months have been notable for a spate of conferences
and meetings, particularly in the US and Europe, related to key
themes in the history of childhood and youth. The following notes
suggest how fertile this field of history has become.
In
February 2002 Claremont Graduate University (CGU) hosted
the Interdisciplinary Children's History Conference.
Papers explored the militarization of children's lives,
visions of girlhood, children's health, education, and welfare,
and children's material culture in both Europe and the Americas.
Conference participant Alan McPherson has published "From
'Punks' to Geopoliticians: U.S. and Panamanian Teenagers and the
1964 Canal Zone Riots" in The Americas (2002), Lisa Jacobson
will be publishing Raising Consumers: Children, Childrearing,
and the American Mass Market in the Early Twentieth Century
with Columbia University Press (2003), and Lisa Ossian's presentation
"Renewed Concerns, New Prescriptions: The Early Depression
Politics of Iowa Farm Children's Health, 1930-1933" resulted
in her appointment by the Lt. Governor to the Iowa Agricultural
Education Commission. Kudos
to the graduate students who organized the conference: Molly Quest Arboleda, Jennifer Hillman Helgren, and Cathy Corder.
For
the complete program, see www.cgu.edu/hum/eng/childhood/Program.html
Paris
has proved to be an important centre for recent work in the field.
Late in 2000 the Sorbonne hosted a three-day colloque, entitled
Lorsque l’enfant grandit: Entre dépendance et
autonomie (September 2000)at which the discussion ranged
from children and demography; family, authority and sociability;
work, social organisation and marginality. According to the colloque
organisers, the collected papers from the meeting are being edited
for publication. Details
of the conference can be found at http://www.ifrance.com/enfantgrandi
In
December 2001 further evidence of the contribution of French scholars
(particularly historians, architects and architectural historians)
was offered by the colloque Ecoles de plein air au XXe siècle,
again organised around Université Paris IV, with the participation
of research centres from Versailles, Ghent and Surèsnes.
The meeting brought together specialists working on the history
of spaces of childhood in modern France. For
titles of papers presented at this conference go to: http://www.revues.org/cgi-bin/calenda/nouvelles.pl?p=1294&config=nouvelles_config
In
the US, in summer 2000, the Benton Foundation sponsored
a conference on the History of Children and Youth in Washington,
DC. A follow-up meeting was held at fMarquette University in July
2001, and at this meeting the Society
for the History of Children and Youth was formed.
In
February 2002 the Department of Popular Culture at Bowling Green
State University organised an interdisciplinary conference on
the topic of "Youth, Popular Culture and Everyday Life"
with a strong emphasis on contemporary and twentieth century youth
cultures, subcultures, material cultures and politics. Details
still up at http://www.bgsu.edu/offices/ics/ycc/panels.html
May
2002 saw a remarkable international interdisciplinary meeting
at the University of California, Berkeley, drawing scholars from
architecture, landscape design, history, geography and comparative
literature to present and discuss on "Designing Modern
Childhoods: Landscape, Buildings and Material Cultures."
This meeting (organised by representatives of the Centre for Working
Families and Southern Denmark University) offered an impressive
example of how interdisciplinarity can work as a powerful and
effective lens through which to view specific themes, in this
case the organisation of space for pre-adults. Conference
description located at: http://www.hum.sdu.dk/projekter/ipfu/designing-childhoods/
More
recently, a number of meetings have been held in the UK at which
the history of youth/childhood has been a direct or tangential
focus for discussion. A summer conference (July 2001) at the Institute
of Contemporary British History, University of London, entitled
"The Permissive Society and Its Enemies," offered
a talking shop for new research into writing the history of 1960s
youth subcultures.
In
the summer of 2002, the Tenth International Planning History Conference,
"Cities of Tomorrow" in London, UK, featured
the theme of childhood and planning in its schedule (www.iphs2002.com),
and further evidence for the vitality of historical research into
spaces of pre-adulthood was provided in August 2002 at the Sixth
International Conference on Urban History at Edinburgh, UK. Here,
Detlef Siegfried and Axel Schildt chaired a panel of scholars
from Western, Central and Eastern Europe discussing "European
Cities, Public Sphere and Youth in the 20th Century."
(Paper titles and text are still available at http://www.esh.ed.ac.uk/urban_history
and the papers from this panel are due to appear in print as an
edited volume in 2003.)
Future
Events:
The
last few months have been notable for the number of conferences
and panels of interest to scholars working on the history of children
and youth, and calls for papers being issued currently suggest
that the trend is likely to continue, particularly in the UK and
US.
"The Unforgivable Crime: Child Murder in History" is
the title of an interdisciplinary meeting to be held at Oxford
Brookes University, Oxford, UK in September 2003
(details at http://www2.h-net.msu.edu/announce/show.cgi?ID=131123).
Meanwhile,
a conference on the literature of children and young adults with
a strand discussing the uses of history is scheduled for February
2003 to be held in Albuquerque, New Mexico (for details see http://www2.h-net.msu.edu/announce/show.cgi?ID=131209).
Finally,
the SHCY will hold its second biennial meeting in Baltimore, July
26-29, 2003. The call for papers has been
reprinted in the SHCY Newsletter.
