scholarly journals Temporalizing Childhood: A Conversation with Erica Burman, Stephanie Olsen, Spyros Spyrou, and Hanne Warming

2021 ◽  
pp. 59-73
Author(s):  
Zsuzsa Millei
Keyword(s):  
Childhood Studies

This paper is a summary of the keynote panel conversation that took place as part of the “Childhood in Time”conference, May 10–12, 2021. The speakers respond to the question of how they place childhood in time relations,giving examples from their own research and outlining an agenda for considering time in childhood studies.

The Suffering of the Perpetrators: The Ethics of Traumatic German Historicity in Karen Bass's Young Adult World War II Novels

2014 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 64-77
Author(s):  
Doris Wolf
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Young Adult ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Childhood Studies ◽  
Historical Narratives ◽  
World War ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Past ◽  
Adult World ◽  
The Public Sphere

This paper examines two young adult novels, Run Like Jäger (2008) and Summer of Fire (2009), by Canadian writer Karen Bass, which centre on the experiences of so-called ordinary German teenagers in World War II. Although guilt and perpetration are themes addressed in these books, their focus is primarily on the ways in which Germans suffered at the hands of the Allied forces. These books thus participate in the increasingly widespread but still controversial subject of the suffering of the perpetrators. Bringing work in childhood studies to bear on contemporary representations of German wartime suffering in the public sphere, I explore how Bass's novels, through the liminal figure of the adolescent, participate in a culture of self-victimisation that downplays guilt rather than more ethically contextualises suffering within guilt. These historical narratives are framed by contemporary narratives which centre on troubled teen protagonists who need the stories of the past for their own individualisation in the present. In their evacuation of crucial historical contexts, both Run Like Jäger and Summer of Fire support optimistic and gendered narratives of individualism that ultimately refuse complicated understandings of adolescent agency in the past or present.

Exploring political rupture through Jewish children’s diaries: Kindertransport children in France, 1938-1942

2021 ◽  
pp. 161189442110177
Author(s):  
Laura Hobson Faure
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Childhood Studies ◽  
Political Environment ◽  
World War ◽  
Daily Lives ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
Nazi Occupation ◽  
Jewish Children ◽  
European Jewish ◽  
Children's Testimony

This article focuses on France as a refuge for unaccompanied Central European Jewish children on the eve of World War II. Contrary to the United Kingdom, which accepted 10,000 Jewish children through Kindertransport, only 350-450 children entered France. This article utilizes children’s diaries and organizational records to question how children perceived and recorded their displacement and resettlement in France, a country that would soon be at war, and then occupied, by Nazi Germany. By questioning how these events filtered into and transformed children’s lives, I argue that the shifting political environment led to profound transformations in these children’s daily lives long before their very existence was threatened by Nazi–Vichy deportation measures. Most children were cared for in collective children’s homes in the Paris region in which left-oriented educators established children’s republics. Yet the outbreak of war triggered a series of events in the homes that led to changes in pedagogical methods and new arrivals (and thus new conflicts). The Nazi occupation of France led to the children’s displacement to the Southern zone, their dispersal into new homes, and the reconfiguration of their networks. This analysis of children’s contemporaneous sources and the conditions under which they were produced places new emphasis on the epistemology of Kindertransport sources and thus contributes to larger theoretical discussions in Holocaust and Childhood studies on children’s testimony.

scholarly journals The queer child cracks: Queer feminist encounters with materiality and innocence in childhood studies

Childhood ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 090756822110269
Author(s):  
Ellie Walton
Keyword(s):  
Lived Experience ◽  
Queer Theory ◽  
Childhood Studies

This article questions how we might continue to envision an open and inviting engagement between the terrains of childhood studies and queer theory. Matters of childhood innocence in particular are problematised throughout. The paper builds on the offerings of queer of colour scholarship and women of colour feminism, endeavouring to contribute to an emergent childhood studies that is informed by queer and feminist understandings that uphold the materiality and lived experience of the child, both in theory and in practice.

scholarly journals How Children in Germany Experience Refugees: A Contribution From Childhood Studies

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sabine Andresen ◽  
Sascha Neumann ◽  
Ulrich Schneekloth
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Refugee Children ◽  
Childhood Studies ◽  
Representative Survey ◽  
Fourth World ◽  
Political Issues ◽  
Qualitative Case Studies ◽  
World Vision

AbstractThis paper deals with perceptions, encounters and experiences of children with refugees and refugee children in Germany. It is based on the Fourth World Vision Children Study, which is regularly conducted in Germany since 2007. The study is based on a representative survey among 6- to 11-year-old children, which was combined with qualitative case studies and focuses on children´s well-being, their fears, their concerns as well as their attitudes toward other societal groups and contemporary political issues. For the survey of the Fourth World Vision Children Study, in the questionnaire there were also items included which should allow collecting data on children´s encounters and experiences with refugees, and particularly refugees who are their peers. This paper presents the approach taken in the study and how it is embedded conceptually in childhood studies before reporting and discussing selected findings on the experiences of children in Germany with refugees in their neighbourhood and among their peers. The findings presented in this paper refer to contact as well as interactions and opportunities for establishing friendships between refugee and non-refugee children. This is followed by a discussion of the implications these findings have in terms of consequences for supporting refugee children when arriving at Germany. In the conclusion, we will finally point out the implications of our study for the broader field of childhood studies in social sciences.

scholarly journals Child-led research, children’s rights and childhood studies: A defence

Childhood ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 090756822199674
Author(s):  
Nigel Patrick Thomas
Keyword(s):  
Children's Rights ◽  
Children’S Rights ◽  
Childhood Studies ◽  
Research With Children ◽  
Ethics Of Research

Recent articles by Kim and Hammersley have critiqued, respectively: the methodological and normative assumptions that underlie research ‘by’ children; claims made about the implications of children’s rights for the ethics of research with children; and more broadly, some of the central commitments of Childhood Studies. This paper offers a response to these critiques, seeking to distinguish between those that clearly should be accepted, those that appear to be based on a misreading of the claims being made by scholars and researchers, and those that represent serious challenges to defend, redefine or rethink our aims, claims or practices.

Comment on Sarah Maza’s “The Kids Aren’t All Right”

2020 ◽  
Vol 125 (4) ◽  
pp. 1293-1295
Author(s):  
Nara Milanich
Keyword(s):  
Review Essay ◽  
Critical Review ◽  
Historical Analysis ◽  
Limiting Factors ◽  
Childhood Studies ◽  
Chronological Age ◽  
History Of ◽  
Children And Childhood ◽  
Historical Agency

Abstract In a complement to the 2020 AHR Roundtable “Chronological Age: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis” (125, no. 2), this AHR Exchange focuses on the history of children and childhood. Sarah Maza presents a critical review essay, highlighting the limiting factors in the expanding field of childhood studies. Children, she observes, produce few sources of their own voices, have limited agency, and as individuals and as a group soon outgrow their subaltern status—they grow up. Robin P. Chapdelaine, Nara Milanich, Steven Mintz, Ishita Pande, and Bengt Sandin—historians representing diverse geographical, theoretical, and methodological perspectives on the history of children and childhood—react to Maza’s observations by bringing up important methodological questions about subjecthood, agency, and modernity. Maza’s rejoinder reflects on these questions and on the possibility of age-based historical agency.

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