Margaret Peacock to discuss her recent book, Innocent Weapons: The Soviet and American Politics of Childhood in the Cold War

Innocent Weapons: The Soviet and American Politics of Childhood in the Cold War, recently published in the New Cold War History series at The University of North Carolina Press, edited by Odd Arne Westad Innocent Weapons is a transnational history of the image of the child from 1945 to 1968. It explores the abundance of childhood images that Soviet and American politicians, propagandists, and protesters manufactured for the purpose of building international and domestic consensus for the Cold War. It examines how these efforts ironically led to a collapse of that consensus in the late 1960s as well as a fundamental shift in American and Soviet understandings of childhood. The book argues that leaders and propagandists in the United States and the Soviet Union used images of children in comparable ways to rally their populations behind their domestic and international policies, to pursue popular consensus, and to ensure the preservation of public order. When one reads the story of the Cold War through the lens of the child’s image, the ideological differences that seemingly differentiated the Eastern Bloc from the Western Sphere are tempered by the revelation that Soviet and American leaders and propagandists were in fact engaging in similar visual and rhetorical projects in order to sell a war, to preserve power, to justify policy, and to maintain order. These portrayals, which span the ideological and geographic boundaries of the conflict, reveal a story in which the producers of these images had more in common with each other than they did with their intended audiences. By viewing the Cold War as a dialectic between those who owned the means of image production and the intended consumers of those images, this story suggests that we must reexamine our previous understandings of the divides that defined the war itself.

Caminhos que as crianças fazem para a escola em todos os "cantos" do mundo

Sertão – Brasil

Misrata – Líbia

Wyalkatchem – Austrália

Hoëdic – França

Casablanca – Marrocos

Childhood Studies Colloquium

Childhood Studies Colloquium

14 November 2014     9.30am – 4.30pm

Faculty of Education, The University of Auckland

Keynote address: Making a difference - connecting rights, research and policy

Emeritus Professor Anne B. Smith, University of Otago       

Call for papers and participation

The aim of this colloquium is to bring researchers from across the social sciences, humanities and education together to begin a critical conversation about the past, present and future of childhood studies in Aotearoa New Zealand. The first hui coincides with the 25^th anniversary of UNCRC and critically reflects on its trials and tribulations. The organisers welcome contributions from any disciplinary perspective and encourage postgraduate students to participate.

Presentation

We invite 5-10 minute theoretically-informed presentations. All presentations will be delivered to the entire audience to facilitate and encourage an interdisciplinary exchange of ideas. We encourage work-in-progress, and  critical thinking about children and childhood in light of 25 years of UNCRC, in order to foster new ideas and conversations and to mobilise innovative  interdisciplinary research in Aotearoa.

Abstract submission

Abstracts should be emailed to the organisers by 20^th October 2014. Please include in your name, email, affiliation, title of your paper and an abstract of no more than 150 words, and a very brief biographical note outlining your disciplinary relationship with childhood studies. Acceptance will be notified by 30^th October 2014.

Contact:

Dr Christina Ergler, University of Otago       christina.ergler@otago.ac.nz

Dr Marek Tesar, University of Auckland       m.tesar@auckland.ac.nz

25 years of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC): The relevance of children’s rights in a higher education context

It is 25 years this November since the UNCRC was internationally agreed. Join us to celebrate and reflect upon the UNCRC, children’s rights, and higher education:
· What is the place of a children’s rights perspective in developing professional and academic practices?
· How does a children’s rights perspective challenge our assumptions as students, lecturers and researchers in higher education?
· Should higher education be taking more account of children’s perspectives?

Speakers include:
· Dr. Afua Twum Danso Imoh, Lecturer in the Sociology of Childhood at the University of Sheffield and co-editor of the recent book Children’s Lives in an Era of Children’s Rights: The Progress of the Convention on the Rights of the Child in Africa.
· Professor Priscilla Alderson, Professor Emerita of Childhood Studies at the Institute of Education. Her work on children’s competence, wisdom and rights has been widely published.
· Professionals from educational, legal, and NGO sectors, who are or were studying at the Institute of Education. They will reflect on how children’s rights perspectives have informed their own work and studies.

Please come and join the dialogue!

Date: 19th November 2014
Time: 6-8pm, followed by refreshments and reception
Place: Committee Room 1, Institute of Education, 20 Bedford Way, London

Please RSVP to Rachel Rosen: r.rosen@ioe.ac.uk

Shaping Childhoods through Death in Children's Literature and Film

The focus of IRSCL 2015 is “Creating Childhoods: Creation and (Re)-Interpretation through the Body, Histories and the Arts.” A panel is being formed to consider the powerful and significant connection between the Congress’s theme and that of death in children’s literature and film. How can what is absent be made present? How can silence, void, and emptiness be represented on the page and/or screen? What are the implications of narratives about children who disappear? What is the child's agency as a site of inscription of childhoods as these childhoods relate to death? Why and how are new childhood(s) created from these inscriptions? How does a binary of children's and adult literature emerge and operate when treating death in children’s literature? These – and other – questions will be addressed.

For more information on the Congress, please refer to http://www.worcester.ac.uk/discover/irscl-22nd-biennial-congress-august-2015.html If you are interested in being a participant on this panel, please contact Lesley Clement, lclement@lakeheadu.ca with a 75-100 word proposal and short bio by 31 October 2014.

“Já pensou pedro com um cabelão de maria chiquinha! Não combina, né?!” Geografia e gênero na educação infantil

Vale conferir o texto:

“Já pensou pedro com um cabelão de maria chiquinha! Não combina, né?!” Geografia e gênero na educação infantil
de
Thiago Bogossian

Resumo

Na contemporaneidade ainda persiste a concepção de que existem diferentes comportamentos esperados para homens e mulheres. A partir de uma sociedade que se constituiu através da cultura de superioridade dos homens sobre as mulheres sob a égide do patriarcado, uma série de impedimentos culturais em termos de mobilidade, comportamento, linguagens, roupas e afinidades foram estabelecidos para diferenciar o gênero masculino e feminino, com base unicamente na diferença entre os sexos. O que ocorre, no entanto, é que o gênero é uma categoria social e não biológica, portanto está relacionado à cultura e à história. Na escola brasileira, a desigualdade de gênero ainda assume diferentes feições, ora estigmatizando comportamentos, ora normatizando corpos, ora permitindo um contato diferenciado entre meninas, meninos e as professoras. Elaborado a partir dos referenciais teóricos dos estudos de gênero, da Sociologia da Infância e da Ciência Geográfica, este artigo pretende apresentar algumas reflexões, mesmo que ainda de forma inconclusiva, relacionadas à desigualdade de gênero presente em uma instituição de Educação Infantil no município de Niterói, no Estado do Rio de Janeiro.

Acesse o texto completo em:

http://www.seer.ufs.br/index.php/revtee/article/view/2963

Thiago Bogossian é membro do Grupo de Pesquisas e Estudos em Geografia da Infância. Graduando em Geografia e mestrando em Educação pela UFF.

5th International and Interdisciplinary Conference on Emotional Geographies

5th International and Interdisciplinary Conference on Emotional Geographies
10-12 June 2015, Edinburgh (UK)
http://emotionalgeographiesconference.wordpress.com/

Session: Relational geographies of emotions/affects, childhood and youth

Convenors: Matej Blazek (Loughborough University, UK), John Horton (University of Northampton, UK), Peter Kraftl (University of Leicester, UK)

Abstracts are invited for a session exploring intersections between emotional/affective geographies and geographies of childhood and youth, with a focus upon theorising and exemplifying the multiple forms of relationality that might characterise those intersections.

Geographers working with children and young people have often researched and written about emotions and/or affects. Indeed, many ‘children’s geographers’ have also contributed significantly to the burgeoning transdisciplinary field of ‘emotional geographies’. For example, the work of children’s geographers has often been characterised by: an empirical focus upon children and young people’s emotional experiences of diverse everyday spaces; a sustained commitment to extending feminist, psychological, participatory, critical, hybrid, or nonrepresentational modes of thinking-writing-researching emotions and affects; and a critical concern with normative, emotive constructs of childhood and youth (as loved (‘angels’) or despised (‘devils’); as feared or feared-for; as cared-for or cared about; as loci for contemporary societal hopes and panics).

In this session, we seek to develop the focus on relationality in emotional and affective geographies of children and youth, building on Bondi’s (2005) seminal paper and later work on geographies of emotions and affect, within and outside the sub-field of children’s geographies (Blazek and Windram-Geddes 2013). In this context, we would welcome proposals for papers (15 minutes duration) from diverse conceptual positions and international contexts, which address one or more of the following themes and explore intersections between emotions/affect and childhood/youth and between work on ‘children’s’ and ‘emotional’ geographies:

·       Relationalities of emotions/affects, cognition and practices (e.g. Blazek 2013);

·       More-than-human and more-than-social relationalities of emotions/affects (e.g. Kraftl 2013);

·       Adults’ emotions towards children, and/or vice versa (e.g. Philo 2011);

·       The articulation of emotions and/or affective atmospheres in the design, control and manipulation of spaces of/for childhood (e.g. Kraftl and Adey 2008);

·       The importance of emotions/affects in constituting (bio)politics of/for childhood (e.g. Lee 2013);

·       The deployment of emotions/affects in attempts to oppose, subvert, twist or produce childhoods ‘other’ to perceived mainstreams (with particular emphasis upon child-adult affiliations);

·       The processual and sociotechnical constitution of emotions/affects;

·       Emotions/affects and power relations, exclusions, regulations and governmentality in children’s and young people’s lives (e.g. Gagen 2014);

·       Ways of relating: methodological and conceptual innovation in articulating relational emotions/affects (including cross-disciplinary collaborations);

·       Temporality and ongoingness of emotions/affects in relation to growing up, young (age)ing, family or intergenerationality (e.g. Horton and Kraftl 2006);

·       Emotional geographies of familial relations (e.g. Harker and Martin 2012), friendships (Bunnell et al 2012) or popular (sub-)cultural identities (Horton 2012);

·       Relational dynamics of emotional and/or affecting experiences of fieldwork relating to childhood and youth (e.g. Horton 2008, Hadfield-Hill and Horton 2014).

Please send abstracts (300 words max) by 11^th November 2014 to all three convenors:

Matej Blazek: m.blazek@lboro.ac.uk

John Horton: john.horton@northampton.ac.uk

Peter Kraftl: pk123@leicester.ac.uk

References:

Blazek, M (2013) Emotions as practice: Anna Freud's child psychoanalysis and thinking–doing children's emotional geographies. Emotion, Space and Society, 9, 24-32.

Blazek, M and Windram-Geddes, M (2013) Editorial: Thinking and doing children's emotional geographies. Emotion, Space and Society, 9, 1-3

Bondi, L. (2005) Making connections and thinking through emotions: between geography and psychotherapy. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 30(4), 433-448.

Bunnell, T., Yea, S., Peake, L., Skelton, T., Smith (2012) Geographies of friendships. Progress in Human Geography 30(4), 490-507.

Gagen, E.A. (2014) Governing emotions: citizenship, neuroscience and the education of youth. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, early view.

Hadfield-Hill, S., Horton, J. (2013) Children’s experiences of participating in research: emotional moments together. Children’s Geographies, 12(2), 135-153.

Harker, C., Martin, L. L. (2012) Familial relations: spaces, subjects, and politics. Environment and Planning A, 44(4), 768-775.

Horton, J. (2008) A ‘sense of failure’? Everydayness and research ethics. Children’s Geographies 6(4), 363-383.

Horton, J. (2012) ‘Got my shoes, got my Pokémon': spaces of children's popular culture. Geoforum 43(1), 4-13.

Horton, J., Kraftl, P. (2006) Not just growing up, but going on: children’s geographies as becomings; materials, spacings, bodies, situations. Children’s Geographies, 4(3), 259-276.

Kraftl, P. (2013) Beyond ‘voice’, beyond ‘agency’, beyond ‘politics’? Hybrid childhoods and some critical reflections on children’s emotional geographies. Emotion, Space and Society, 9, 13-23.

Kraftl, P., Adey, P. (2008) Architecture/affect/dwelling.  Annals of the Association of American Geographers. 98(1), 213-231.

Lee, N. (2013) Childhood and Biopolitics: Climate Change, Life Processes and Human Futures. Palgrave Macmillan, London.

Philo, C. (2011) Foucault, sexuality and when not to listen to children. Children’s Geographies, 9(2), 123-127.