Academic Sessions: Belfast 2007
Contesting Childhood
Convenors:
Anna Green, University of East Anglia Norwich School of Art and Design. a.green@nsad.ac.uk
Vivien Northcote (Independent Scholar), vivien72@btinternet.com
Childhood Studies is by now well established in Sociology, History and Literature. In Art History, however, the field remains contested. Art Historians were slow to respond to Arie s’ Centuries of Childhood (1960), the first book of any weight on the subject – although forays were made, particularly, into eighteenth-century British art. In more recent years there has been some recognition of the serious potential of the field. Anne Higonnet’s Pictures of Innocence (1998) was pathbreaking, if problematic, in the questions it asked of images of children from Reynolds to contemporary American photography. Then came Picturing Children: Constructions of Children between Rousseau and Freud (2002), an anthology of essays about literary and visual texts, edited by Marilyn Brown. Neither publication was received without protest. Whilst earlier dissentors had contested the area as unworthy of serious academic attention, later objections were to its possible ‘impropriety’. Thus, even in our state of postmodern pluralism, there is a last bastion resistant to relativism: the desirability of an untouchable status for childhood. Contradictorily, perhaps, an anxiety in academia, as in life, that childhood is currently compromised, and even that it is ‘dead’, further inflects the discourse. Art History and Visual Studies are particularly well placed to enter these debates, which so frequently focus upon the image of childhood. The weight and variety of papers in this session emphatically refute the notion that to explore childhood and adolescence is a fundamentally sentimental and unintellectual endeavour, and interrogate the idea that to do so is morally suspect.
Speakers:
Jeannie Labno (University of Sussex)
Visual Representation of Children on Funeral Monuments in Poland (1500–1650)
Emma Barker (The Open University)
Greuze and the ‘Invention of Childhood’
William McKeown (The University of Memphis)
Portrait of the Critic as a Young Man: John Ruskin’s Childhood as Represented in James Northcote’s 1822 Portrait
Philippa Kaina (University College London)
Insubordinate Bodies: Edgar Degas and the formation of a modern adolescent subject
Pamela Gerrish Nunn (University of Canterbury, New Zealand)
I read therefore I am
Mike O’Mahoney (University of Bristol)
Fatherless Children: Redefining Social Relations in the Soviet Union in the wake of the Great Patriotic War
Vicki Carruthers (University of Essex)
Potency, power and unlimited imagination: Encountering childhood in the early works of Dorothea Tanning
Harriet Riches (Middlesex University)
Practicing space: Adolescence and photography in the interior
Susanne Stich (University of Ulster)
‘Which role does time play when we are talking about identity?’: Narrative and late childhood in the work of Eija-Liisa Ahtila
Catherine Grant (The Courtauld Institute of Art)
More than a schoolgirl crush: Amy Adler and the adolescent fan
Outi Remes (Birkbeck College London)
Representing Unborn Children: Reappearances of aborted children in the work of Tracey Emin