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.
