Legal Childhoods

SHCY Panel Submission/CFP

This panel is interested in the long historical legacy of juvenile subjects as represented, and perhaps, created through the discourse of imperial law. We are particularly interested in a trans-Atlantic conversation that may include representations of renaissance English child subjects, colonial child subjects, or early American child subjects as legal manifestations of personhood and minor citizenship find respite in these juvenile bodies. This conversation will inevitably raise questions about what constitutes childhood through an imperialistic eye and long reaching legal precedence; the critical attention of which is often elided by idealistic, ideological, and national understandings of childhood. Papers that take up these critical questions by recognizing legal childhood and juvenile bodies as intersectional subjects in imperialist legal discourses, where race, class, gender, and citizenship define a person’s access to a privileged and/or exploited youth will be given preference. We encourage submissions that address the shifting legal identity of children as they move (or are moved) across geographic space, permeating national borders, and papers that consider the materiality of the juvenile body in relation to place(s) and to object(s).

Interested participants should send a 250 word abstract to gocasion@english.umass.edu and afsimpso@english.umass.edu by  August 31, 2014.