What is your image of the child?

  • What does one mean when one speaks of “children” or “childhood”?
  • What is the relation between “children” and “childhood”?
  • What expectations does one have of and for children?
  • What roles, rights, and responsibilities does one attribute to them?
  • What relations do children have, with each other, but most especially with “adults”?
  • What roles, rights, and responsibilities do those adults have with regards to children?
  • What differences are there in the images one has of different children – and in their relations with different adults?

Sixty years after Philippe Ariès first argued that “the idea of childhood” is a modern invention and thirty years after Allison James and Alan Prout's Constructing and Reconstructing Childhood, there does not yet appear to be any systematic accounting of our existing “images of the child”. This project aims to offer one.

Equalizer Music Music Equalizer  - giorgio9377 / Pixabay

The Goal

An example of what the project aims to produce

The Methods

How the project aims to get there

Books Bookcases Old Read Old Books  - hgenthe / Pixabay

The Corpus

The texts the project will use to get there

The Point

Why, how and for whom this matters

Part of journal citation network

The Literatures

The horizon of academic discussions of children and childhood