Young girls have been overlooked in recent scholarship. On one hand, Girlhood Studies has mainly focused on the teenage girl overlooking challenges specific to younger children, on the other hand research in Child Studies rarely isolate gender as the main focus of study. This workshop wants to bring together Child Studies and Girlhood Studies researchers to explore the notions of and practices of the young girl-child.
This workshop is a collaboration between girlhood researcher Natalie Coulter from York University Canada and child studies researcher Anna Sparrman from Linköping University, Sweden. The workshop takes as its starting point that the girl is a cultural construct. She is a discursive formation onto which social anxieties and debates are often inscribed. The girl has been used as an image to justify many things. She is an image of the future, as a girl becoming, and she is an image of failure, needing to be saved. The purpose of this workshop is to reposition, relocate and reframe the young girl-child age 2 to approximately 12 years old by e.g. asking:
- What does it mean to be a young girl?
- Which girls are visible and which invisible?
- What images/imaginations of the young girl do we live with?
- What do these images/imaginings tell us about the contemporary moment?
- What do actual girls do in everyday life?
- How do girls themselves negotiate, engage, take up, resist or reassemble the cultural frames of girlhood offered to them?
- What do girls’ responses reveal about the contemporary moment of girlhood?
- Do young girls have equal opportunities in what they want to do?
We welcome a wide range of scholarship, particularly work that addresses issues of race, sexuality, gender binaries, class, and the body. We also welcome PhD-students, and scholars across the academia. The idea is to mix presentations with informal collaborations.
Abstract
Send in an abstract of 150 words to anna.sparrman@liu.se and/or ncoulter@yorku.ca by the 15 March 2019.
Costs
There is no fees to participate but each participant needs to be self-funded (travel, food and accommodation). NOTA BENE, if we receive funding in March we will be able to help defray costs for the participants.
Location
Department of thematic Studies – Child Studies, Linköping University, Sweden.
This call is a collaboration between professor Anna Sparrman Department of Thematic Studies – Child Studies, Linköping University Sweden and Associate Professor Natalie Coulter, Department of Communication Studies. York University, Canada and might be financed by the Canadian SHHRC
