12 Jan Child’s Play: Multi-Sensory Histories of Children and Childhood in Japan and Beyond
Friday, February 27-28, 2015
McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB
The objective of this interdisciplinary symposium is to bring together scholars who are currently working on histories of children and childhood primarily in Japan and are also situating these works within a larger transregional, transnational or global context. We envision a conversation among scholars from a range of fields and disciplinary frameworks who employ different approaches and engage different theoretical questions. We hope to explore how children and childhood have been constructed and what roles they have played in cultural production processes from the Edo period to today. What makes a child a child? What constitutes childhood? Does childhood end for the samurai boy once he gets to carry and perhaps even use a sword? What was the currency of children for the imperialist regime in early twentieth-century Japan? How do contemporary state institutions, commercial enterprises and other entities mobilize children for political goals and public relations campaigns? We are particularly interested in analyses of links across time and space that pay attention to affect, embodiment, and subjectivity, and attempt to rethink theoretical parameters of the study of childhood, gender, and a variety of associated sensibilities.
Sponsored by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, the Society for the History of Children and Youth, the Division of Humanities and Fine Arts, the Division of Letters and Science, the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center, the East Asia Center, and the departments of Art, East Asian Languages & Cultural Studies, History, Sociology, and Anthropology.
Website: http://www.eastasian.ucsb.edu/projects/childs-play/