Programme:

09:15-09:30 Welcome – Julia Gustavsson (University of Oxford)
09:30-11:00 Age and the State
Kristine Alexander (University of Lethbridge) “Infants in the eyes of the law”: Age and Development in the History of Canadian Indian Policy
Jessamy Carlson (The National Archives) “Lorry girls”: absconding and the adjultification of girls in government discourse
Vicky Taylor (University of Oxford) Adultified and criminialised: the construction of childhood in the UK government’s response to people arriving on “small boats”
11:15-12:05 Keynote Paper – Laura Tisdall (Unversity of Newcastle) “It wasn’t about trying to be adults”: becoming child-ish in late Cold War Britain
12:50-13:40 Keynote Paper – Bonnie Evans (University of Manchester) Why internationalism matters to the history of childhood: The World Health Organisation and universal approaches to neurodevelopment, 1948-2025
13:45-15:00 Developing Bodies
Suzanna Winterbourne (University of Oxford) “People are apt to look upon the subject in a wholly frivolous way”: children’s dress, growth and movement in British popular literature (1880-1914)
Shereece Linton-Ramsay (University of Oxford) Staff discipline and Black children’s responses at New York juvenile prisons (1915-1950)
Serena Iacobino (Université Libre de Bruxelles) Degeneration theories and the construction of the ‘new imperial child’: the case of girls’ education in colonial Congo (1908-1960)
Leting Zheng (University of Oregon) Competing®evolutionary narratives: children, labour and happiness during the Great Leap Forward (1958-1962)
Charlie Bell (Kings’s College, London) “Food for thought”: the (pseudo)science of child development in late 20th century Britain
15:15-16:45 Normalisation and Welfare
Hugh Morrison (University of Otago) Colonisation and the language of age: southern New Zealand (1848-1868)
Katie Joice (Birkbeck College, University of London) The limits of Bowlbyism: disability, social policy, and the ‘right to childhood’ in 1970s Britain
Thomas Parkinson (University of Cambridge) Becoming a normal, voluble human: on speech and hearing science in India
16:50-17:25 Keynote Commentary – Sally Shuttleworth (University of Oxford) Recording childhood: from baby biographies to neuroscience

Registration required:
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