4th Global Conference
Childhood

July 17-19, 2014
Mansfield College, Oxford, United Kingdom

Call for Presentations:

This inter-disciplinary and multi-disciplinary conference project seeks to investigate and explore all aspects of childhood. The nature of childhood and its significance as a separate phase of life is viewed quite differently in different cultures and in different historical eras. This conference will look at all aspects of the experience of childhood as well as the social, cultural, historical and psychological perceptions of children and childhood. We encourage submissions on any theme to do with the nature of childhood, including, but not limited to the ones listed below.

1. Definitions of Childhood
-How has the concept of childhood and the discourse on childhood developed over time?
-How is childhood viewed differently across different cultures and eras? Is childhood socially constructed?
-How are the boundaries of childhood defined and implemented and what are the effects on children and adults?
-Is ‘childhood’ a singular category or is it composed of quite distinct multiple categories? How does defining childhood also define adulthood and vice versa?

2. Childhood and Development
-How do we identify aspects of development in childhood (physical, psychological, emotional, intellectual, moral, social, etc.)?
-How do institutions effectively nurture the unique developmental needs of children in schools, medical centres, legal systems, etc.?
3. Children and Relationships
-What are the dynamics of children’s relationships with their family, peers, community and social institutions?
-How are children’s social relationships either experienced positively or negatively?
-What types of relationships do children establish with animals and nature?

4. Perceptions and Depictions of Childhood

Adults on Children:
-How do adults perceive children and childhood?
-How do they perceive their own experiences of childhood? (With nostalgia? embarrassment? amusement?)

Children on Children:
-How do children perceive themselves?
-How can children participate in research on children?

Culture on Children:
-How are children depicted in academia, in the media, in the visual arts, or in myths, folk tales, folk songs, graffiti?
-Children and literature: what are the characteristics of literature that is “for children?’ How did “children’s literature” develop? What role does it play in children’s lives?
-How does literature contribute to defining the boundaries of childhood?

5. Children and society: the larger world
-Children and education: What issues concern how children are educated?
Children and leisure: How is involvement in recreational activities (including sports) either beneficial or harmful to children?
-Children and the law: Does the criminal justice system effectively deal with children both as victims of crime and as perpetrators of crime?
-Children and rights: What rights do children have in virtue of being children? To what extent must the choices of children be respected? How do rights perspectives view children?
-Children and gender: How are children socialized into gender-specific roles? What are the issues and concerns connected to how children form gender and sexual identities?
-What is the nature of children’s relationship to the world of work? -Children and technology: how does the constantly evolving landscape of technology impact the lives and experiences of children?
-Childhood in transition: how does adolescence bridge the child/adult world and to what extent are adolescents caught in a double-bind of being children and being adults?

6. Children as Consumers: Objects and materialism
-How are globalisation and the spread of capitalism (consumerism) affecting childhood?
-What issues are raised by children’s consumerism?
-How do advertisements depict children and what are children’s responses to them/ what is children’s reading of them?
-What do objects made specifically for children tell us about our perception of childhood?
-How has the toy industry evolved with changing conceptions of childhood? Is it addressed only to children?
-How are adult objects adapted to children?
-How do children modify object’s uses to create new meanings?

7. Childishness
-What is “Childishness”?
-How do we distinguish among childishness, child-likeness, and infantilism? Are there gender differences in relation to these concepts?
-How have these concepts developed in different cultures and eras? -What distinctions do we draw between a child’s and adult’s childishness or between male and female childishness?

8. The values of Childhood
-How do adults perceive children’s values?
-What are children’s values in different societies and cultures? -How has the perception of gender affected children in different cultures and over time?
-How do we distinguish between collective and individual children’s values?
-How can children’s values help us better understand the role of children in a family and society?

FOR MORE INFORMATION: www.inter-disciplinary.net/probing-the-boundaries/persons/childhood/call-for-papers/

SECOND CALL FOR PAPERS FOR AN INTERNATIONAL INTERDISCIPLINARY CONFERENCE

Re/framing Slavery, Contemporary  Child Labor & Rights, and Abolition and Emancipation across Time and Space: A Conference in Honor of Professor Paul E. Lovejoy

DATE: May 22-May 24, 2014
VENUE: Jaria Hotel, No. 1 Levender Street, East Legon-Accra, Ghana

During the past half-century or so, the study of slavery and debt-bondage, abolition and emancipation, and very recently child labor in the contemporary era, all related to the political economies of states and societies, has engendered a great diversity of fields that are marked by increasingly refined questions and perspectives. In this regard, one recent focus has been on contemporaneous abuse of the body and labor of the child, the woman, and the poor across the globe, both in industrialized and non-industrialized countries. This call for papers in honor of Professor Paul E. Lovejoy of York University, Toronto, Canada, will re/frame some of the issues that inform topics in the constituencies of unfree labor across time and space.

A prolific scholar, Lovejoy has been an uninterrupted incandescent light in the field of slavery, debt-bondage, and abolition in Africa. Another plank of his work is the ways that slavery configured the African Diaspora and the broader Atlantic basin. Problematizing child labor in Africa and the African Diaspora in historic and contemporary times, Lovejoy is among scholars who continue to chart new pathways by asking ever more piquant questions in the field that relate research to life and wellbeing. Some of his perspectives on child labor have found a niche in recent works by other scholars who show that postslavery labor, in so many ways defined by the ongoing epoch of unidirectional globalization and its economic tentacles, has paradoxically increased systemic inequalities and actually expanded the charted frontiers of pre-abolition forms of child labor. With child labor, human and sex trafficking, and modern slavery documented to be rife worldwide, the United Nations, governments, NGOs, etc. are making great efforts applying research, teaching, information dissemination, policing, and so on to end them. It is well to note that Lovejoy and his Harriet Tubman Institute are actively partnering organizations such as Alliance and UNESCO to cast light on and curb unfree labor worldwide

We invite you to come to this international interdisciplinary conference, contribute a paper, and engage in discussions with diverse scholars in honor of Professor Lovejoy’s prodigious contributions to research, teaching, and activism in the field. The proposed conference, among others, seeks to refurbish and rethink staple conclusions; provide syntheses of emergent historiographies; offer seamless refinements to extant theories and paradigms; furnish new empirical and theoretical perspectives on structures/features and agencies of slavery and debt-bondage, abolition and emancipation; and examine the political economy of contemporary child labor and modern slavery as well as proffering recommendations to curb them. Plenary speakers will include eminent scholars and peers of Professor Lovejoy.

Contact: kaparr@ship.edu
Announcement ID: 208402
FOR MORE INFORMATION:  http://www.h-net.org/announce/show.cgi?ID=208402