The sixth biennial of the Society for the History of Children and Youth frames childhood studies within the discourse of space. The proposed session “The Child in the City” is titled after Colin Ward’s 1978 study of the predicament and agency of children living in urban environments. The framing of childhood in relation to the socio-spatial category of the city rather than the nation or the family is intended to focus attention on a defining but little theorized discourse of childhood, one which frames it in relation to the experience of urbanity and the process of urbanization. On the one hand, the ideal of childhood as state of innocence has been defined in opposition to the urban predicament, informing policies that compensate the child of the ‘loss’ of nature; on the other hand, major 20th century social and urban reforms were initiated to address the predicament of children living in cities. Tied with this project was the formation of sociological, anthropological, educational and medical bodies of knowledge that studied the impact of the city on the child, and in that process, produced the terms with which we know and perceive both the child and the city.
This session seeks papers on topics such as:
Modern architecture and urban planning
Urban childhood as a literary, cinematic or photographic trope
Surveys and studies of urban children in historical context
Population planning and pronatalism
Children as agents and consumers or of urban environments
Race, class, and gender relations
Please email a 250 word abstract and 2 page CV to Dr. Roy Kozlovsky no later than October 20, 2012. The selected papers will be submitted to the SHCY by October 31, 2012. Final decision will be made no later than January 31, 2013.
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