"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.
