As a new field in the Humanities, child studies is emerging from the confluence of original scholarship from history, literature, psychology, education, and public policy. Child Studies scholars believe that age, just as much as class, race or gender, provides a crucially important category for analysis. The lens of age can have a profound impact on the questions we ask, how we interpret texts and historical sources, how we imagine subjective experience, and how our research stands in relation to contemporary society. We are organizing this conference to consider both how scholars of childhood and youth have reimagined their subject and how childhood studies is creating a place for itself in the academy. We will bring to campus a mix of scholars and activists to discuss how the social and political reality of childhood has changed in recent decades, how our understanding of childhood has developed over the same period, and the extent to which scholarly understanding and social realities have been mutually illuminating.
We think that this event is particularly timely as we head into the 40 year anniversary of Dartmouth going co-ed, and see it as inaugurating the kinds of reflection that our community will want to engage in as we understand our institutional history in relation to our present moment and contemplate the future of co-education. The focus on children seems particularly crucial from an academic and social policy perspective, and we think that the success of the event will hinge on this dual function -- of the conference functioning as a forum for scholarly exchange, and as a reflection on activist history in relation to the present moment.
Cosponsored by The Leslie Center for the Humanities, Women and Gender Studies Program at Dartmouth, Office of the Provost and the Office of the Dean of the Faculty for Interdisciplinary Studies.
Last Updated: 5/4/12