- 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.
The Goal
An example of what the project aims to produce
The Methods
How the project aims to get there
The Corpus
The texts the project will use to get there
The Point
Why, how and for whom this matters
The Literatures
The horizon of academic discussions of children and childhood