Participants
Over the past three years, the following individuals have contributed to the development of PLACIM through participating in international workshop and/or delivering book chapters for edited volumes:
Over the past three years, the following individuals have contributed to the development of PLACIM through participating in international workshop and/or delivering book chapters for edited volumes:
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Over the past three years, the following individuals have contributed to the development of PLACIM through participating in international workshop and/or delivering book chapters for edited volumes:
Placim has put out two edited volumes which showcase alternative approaches to the cultural history of childhood:
Edited by Elisabeth Wesseling
Paperback 2016 Routledge
Topic:
Taking up the understudied relationship between the cultural history of childhood and media studies, this volume traces twentieth-century migrations of the child-savage analogy from colonial into postcolonial discourse across a wide range of old and new media. Older and newer media such as films, textbooks, children's literature, periodicals, comic strips, children's radio, and toys are deeply implicated in each other through ongoing 'remediation', meaning that they continually mimic, absorb and transform each other's representational formats, stylistic features, and content. Media theory thus confronts the cultural history of childhood with the challenge of re-thinking change in childhood imaginaries as transformation-through-repetition patterns, rather than as rise-shine-decline sequences. This volume takes up this challenge, demonstrating that one historical epoch may well accommodate diverging childhood repertoires, which are recycled again and again as they are played out across a whole gamut of different media formats in the course of time.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Elisabeth Wesseling
I THE CHILD SAVAGE IN (NEO-) COLONIAL DISCOURSE
1 Technologies of Power: School Discourse in Nineteenth-Century Ireland
Vanessa Rutherford
2 Kipling’s Just So Stories: The Recapitulative Child and Evolutionary Progress
Ruth Murphy
3 Of Savages and Wild Children: Diverging Representations of Exotic Peoples and Young Pranksters in Comic Strips from the Belle Époque
Pascal Lefèvre
4 Getting to Know the Other: Dutch Children’s Magazines and Alterity (1890-1910)
Helma van Lierop-Debrauwer
5 Africa in Ritual Practice and Mythic Consciousness in the Kulturfilm of the Weimar Republic (1918-1933)
Luke Springman
6 Childhood and Primitivism: The Impact of the Négritude Movement on Avant-Garde Children’s Literature
Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer
II DOMESTIC SAVAGES
7 Animals, Angels, and Americans: Remediating Dickensian Melodrama in the Comic Strip Little Orphan Annie (1924-1945)
Elisabeth Wesseling
8 The Teenaged Savage Goes to Hollywood: G. Stanley Hall’s Recapitulation Theory and American Exploitation Cinema (1930-1945)
Joshua Garrison
9 Listening with Mother: The Cultivation of Children’s Radio
Kate Lacey
10 Wild Children and Wicked Journalists: The Remediation of Tabloid Images of Childhood in Contemporary Children’s Literature
Vanessa Joosen
III POSTCOLONIAL PLAYGROUNDS
11 Representing Violence, Playing Control: Warring Constructions of Masculinity in Action Man Toys (1960-1990)
Jonathan Bignell
12 “Back to that Special Time”: Nostalgia and the Remediation of Children’s Media in the Adult World
Lincoln Geraghty
13 Otherwordly Children: Wild Children, Global Crises, and the Desire for Redemption
Isabel Hoving
Edited by Elisabeth Wesseling
Hardback 2017 Routledge
Topic:
While Romantic-era concepts of childhood nostalgia have been understood as the desire to retrieve the ephemeral mindset of the child, this collection proposes that the emergence of digital media has altered this reflective gesture towards the past. No longer is childhood nostalgia reliant on individual memory. Rather, it is associated through contemporary convergence culture with the commodities of one's youth as they are recycled from one media platform to another. Essays in the volume's first section identify recurrent patterns in the recycling, adaptation, and remediation of children's toys and media, providing context for section two's exploration of childhood nostalgia in memorial practices. In these essays, the contributors suggest that childhood toys and media play a role in the construction of s the imagined communities (Benedict Anderson) that define nations and nationalism. Eschewing the dichotomy between restorative and reflexive nostalgia, the essays in section three address the ethics of nostalgia in terms of child agency and depictions of childhood. In a departure from the notion that childhood nostalgia is the exclusive prerogative of narrative fiction, section four looks for its traces in the child sciences. Pushing against nostalgia's persistent associations with wishful thinking, false memories, and distortion, this collection suggests nostalgia is never categorically good or bad in itself, but owes its benefits or defects to the ways in which it is brought to bear on the representation of children and childhood.
Table of Contents
Introduction
Elisabeth Wesseling
I. The Cultural Dynamics of Cross-Generational (Re-)appropriation
1 Historical Roots of Consumption-Based Nostalgia for Childhood in the US
Gary Cross
2 Nostalgia or Innovation? The Adaptation of Dutch Children’s Books to Film
Helma van Lierop
3 Superheroes and Identity: The Role of Nostalgia in Comic Book Culture
Carol Tilley
4 (Re) Constructing Childhood Memories: Nostalgia, Creativity and the Expanded Worlds of the Lego Fan Community
Lincoln Geraghty
II Childhood Nostalgia and Memorial Politics
5 Nostalgic Panoramas of Childhood: Toy Objects in Ireland (1851-1909)
Vanessa Rutherford
6 Making Children’s ‘Classics’, Making Past Childhoods: Children’s ‘Classics’ as Sites for Memory Politics and Nostalgia
Helle Strandgaard Jensen
7 Propaganda and Nostalgia: Constructing Memories about the German Democratic Republic for Secondary School Children
Luke Springman
8 Communist Childhoods and Nostalgia: A Cultural Analysis of Online Remembrance Strategies (2006-2011) Codruta Pohrib
9 Lost in Nostalgia: Images of Childhood in Photo Books for Children
Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer
III Modalities of Nostalgia
10 Looking for Asymmetries: A Theoretical Approach to Childhood Nostalgia in Pre-Figurative Culture
Mariano Narodowski
11 Perverse Nostalgia: Child Sex Abuse as Trauma Commodity in Neo- Victorian Fiction
Mel Kohlke
12 “Scared Straight” and Beyond: The Presumption of Teenaged Guilt and the Perpetuation of Defeated Paradigms
Joshua Garrison
13 Teenage Nostalgia and the Recycling of the Homecoming Topos: Perpetual Adolescents in Little Children (2006) and Young Adult (2011)
Anita Wohlmann
14 Ambivalent longings: Nostalgia in the Picturebooks of Pieter Gaudesaboos
Vanessa Joosen
15 Children’s Music and Nostalgia: Digging in the Past with an Eye to the Future
Ingeborg Lunde Vestad
16 Happiness is Quite Common: Postmemory of ‘The Fifties’ in De Daltons (1999-2010)
Elisabeth Wesseling
IV Nostalgic Science
17 Comics, Childhood, and Nostalgia: Frederic Wertham and the Comic Book Panic of the 1950s
Andrew O’Malley
18 Back to Where We Came From: Evolutionary Psychology and Children’s Media
Karin Lesnik-Oberstein and Neil Cocks
Edited by Vanessa Joosen
Forthcoming in 2018, Jackson: University of Mississipi Press.
Topic:
Media narratives in popular culture often assign interchangeable characteristics to childhood and old age, presuming a resemblance between children and the elderly. These designations in media can have far-reaching repercussions in shaping not only language, but also cognitive activity and behavior. The meaning attached to biological, numerical age-even the mere fact that we calculate a numerical age at all-is culturally determined, as is the way people "act their age."With populations aging all around the world, awareness of intergenerational relationships and associations surrounding old age is becoming urgent. Connecting Childhood and Old Age in Popular Media caters to this urgency and contributes to age literacy by supplying insights into the connection between childhood and senescence to show that people are aged by culture. Treating classic stories like the Brothers Grimm's fairy tales and Heidi; pop culture hits like The Simpsons and Mad Men; and international productions, such as Turkish television cartoons and South Korean films, contributors explore the recurrent idea that "children are like old people," as well as other relationships between children and elderly characters as constructed in literature and media from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. This volume deals with fiction and analyzes language as well as verbally sparse, visual productions, including children's literature, film, television, animation, and advertising.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Vanessa Joosen
1. United by God and Nature: Johanna Spyri’s Heidi and Her Relationship with the Elderly
Ingrid Tomkowiak
2. Happily Ever After for the Old in Japanese Fairy Tales
Mayako Murai
3. Vitalizing Childhood through Old Age in Hector Malot’s Sans famille: An Intersectional Perspective
Elisabeth Wesseling
4. The Right to Self-Determination: Ageism in Two Dutch Children’s Books on the Voluntary Death of Elderly People
Helma van Lierop-Debrauwer
5. Extremely Close Generations: Childhood and Old Age in Jonathan Safran Foer’s Novel
Vanessa Joosen
6. The “Strawberry Generation”: Two Views on Intergenerational Relations in Post–Cold War Taiwan
Emily Murphy
7. Intergenerational Bonding in Recent Films from South Korea
Sung-Ae Lee
8. Mischief and Mayhem: A Cultural History of the Relationship between Children and Old People in the Contemporary Family Film
Lincoln Geraghty
9. Grandparents and Grandchildren in The Simpsons:Intergenerational Rupture and Prefigurative Culture
Mariano Narodowski and Verónica Gottau
10. Sustaining and Transgressing Borders: The Relationship between Children and the Elderly in Mad Men
Cecilia Lindgren and Johanna Sjöberg
11. Representations of Intergenerational Relationships in Children’s Television in Turkey: Inquiries and Propositions
Gökçe Elif Baykal and Ilgım Veryeri Alaca
12. “It’s Disgusting!”: Children Enacting Mixed-Age Differences in Advertising
Anna Sparrman
Roundtable “Citizenship Education Through Childhood Heritage in Europe,” Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth
Edited by Lincoln Geraghty
Forthcoming in vol. 11, number 1, 2018.
Topic:
Processes of migration, European integration, globalization, and decolonization pose new challenges for citizienship education, i.e. the preparation for active participation in democratic communities. Ongoing debates about the meanings of belonging in a globalizing Europe are transforming citizenship from an exclusive node of identification with the nation- state into a multi-dimensional identification process with socio-spatial communities at the micro-, meso-, and macro-, levels of global society. The contributions to this roundtable all discuss specific cases of childhood heritage practices with a view to gain greater clarity about the ways in which they may provide citizenship eduction with suitable content while navigating their way around the pitfalls of nationalism and universalism. Children’s fictions, we argue, are eminently suitable for socializing children into the paradoxical European project of creating unity in diversity.
Table of Contents
Introduction
Elisabeth Wesseling
1. Captain Euro and Citizenship Education: Creating a Comic Book Hero for European Children
Lincoln Geraghty
2. Whose Canon? The Absence of Children’s Voices in the Polish Canon Battle
Justyna Desczc-Tryhubzak
3. Renegotiating Cultural Heritage and Personal Belonging: The Anne Frank Museum in Aidan Chambers’ Postcards From No Man’s Land and John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars
Vanessa Joosen
4. Prix Jeunesse and the Negotiation of Citizenship in Children’s Television
Helle Strandgaard Jensen
5. Children as World Citizens: Diversity, Pluralistic Citizenship, and Belonging in the O Mundo Picture Book Project7
Sara Vandenbossche
6. Taking Children into a World of Stories: The Dutch Children’s Book Museum and Active Citizenship Education
Helma van Lierop
7. Musical Roots and Routes and Senses of Belonging
Ingeborg Lunde Vestad
The mission of this platform is to face the challenges posed by contemporary media studies to the cultural history of children’s media, i.e. the history of the various imaginaries of childhood as they are shaped by the different media formats that have emerged in the course of time. Cultural history studies how imaginaries of childhood change through time. Media studies have revealed that older and newer media are deeply implicated in each other through ongoing “remediation,” meaning that they continually mimick, absorb, and transform each other’s representational formats, stylistic features, and content. This implies that childhood imaginaries do not succeed each other in linear fashion, but are rather subject to cyclical patterns of transformation-through-repetition. If we take this idea seriously, then conventional methods for writing the cultural history of childhood are in for revision. PLACIM makes a concerted effort to do so through international workshops and publications, tracing how specific childhood constructs circulate between media through time.
PLACIM has been funded through a competitive research grant of the Dutch Science Foundation (NWO, Endowment for the Humanities).
In order to substantiate its platform function, PLACIM has organized various successive international workshops:
This was the inaugural workshop, on dedicated to pre-circulated papers that traced the ways in which the child-savage analogy circulated between various media in the course of the twentieth century, surviving from the colonial into the postcolonial age. Although a linear approach to the cultural history of childhood would look for the a linear pattern of the emergence, waxing and waning of this ‘root metaphor’, our works reveals that, as a matter of fact, the time-worn analogy is revitalized again and again in every media format that has emerged in the course of the twentieth century.
This workshop has been sparked off by the observation that childhood nostalgia has entered into a new phase, now that digital media have opened up unbounded possibilities to recycle childhood commodities from one media platform to another. Childhood nostalgia has become embedded within a dense materiality, in contradistinction to earlier periods, when it was cultivated as a precarious, immaterial sentiment. This volume reconsiders the nature and function of childhood nostalgia. How does childhood nostalgia drive the recycling, adaptation and remediation of children’s toys and media, and conversely, how does convergence culture reinvent nostalgia?
This workshop is about designing a follow-up project for PLACIM to work on through international collaboration. See “plans for the near future”.
This workshop explored the conceptual metaphor “Children are like Old People” (and vice versa) in diverse media from an international perspective.
Convenor: Vanessa Joosen.
This workshop was devoted to acquainting the PLACIM participants with the format and challenges of developing a MC ITN application.
Convenor: Helle Strandgaard Jensen.
This workshop was devoted to the preparation of a Marie Curie Innovative Training Network Application, which mobilizes the insights acquired through new approaches to a cultural history of children’s media to citizenship education for primary school children (8-12 year olds).
Convenor: Elisabeth Wesseling
This workshop was devoted to resubmitting a Marie Curie Innovative Training Network Application in January 2018.
Convenor: Elisabeth Wesseling.
PLACIM is currently working on a Marie Curie Innovative Training Network Application on citizenship education. A brief abstract of this project:
Processes of decolonization, migration, European integration, and globalization pose new challenges for citizenship education, i.e. the preparation for active participation in democratic communities. Ongoing debates about the meanings of ‘belonging’ in a globalizing Europe are transforming ‘citizenship’ from an exclusive node of identification with the nation-state into a multi-dimensional identification process with socio-spatial communities at the micro-, meso-, and macro-levels of global society. CHERIDITY aims to make this multidimensional concept accessible to 8-12 year-olds, by generating new knowledge about the ways in which arts and heritage education can contribute to citizenship education. It focuses on aesthetic artefacts designed for children which have acquired ‘heritage’ status through local, regional, national, and/or transnational appropriations. Collaborating with childhood heritage institutions, we aim to involve the next generation of heritage professionals and researchers in the development of the concepts, contents, policies, and educational strategies necessary for familiarizing the target group with a dynamic and multidimensional understanding of citizenship within non-formal learning environments. One major deliverable will be a collectively curated online exhibition on the meanings of ‘home’ and ‘belonging’, which makes the idea of multipleinterlocking circles of identifications at the various levels of global society tangible for children at the upper level of elementary education.
The mission of this platform is to face the challenges posed by contemporary media studies to the cultural history of children’s media, i.e. the history of the various imaginaries of childhood as they are shaped by the different media formats that have emerged in the course of time. Cultural history studies how imaginaries of childhood change through time. Media studies have revealed that older and newer media are deeply implicated in each other through ongoing “remediation,” meaning that they continually mimick, absorb, and transform each other’s representational formats, stylistic features, and content. This implies that childhood imaginaries do not succeed each other in linear fashion, but are rather subject to cyclical patterns of transformation-through-repetition. If we take this idea seriously, then conventional methods for writing the cultural history of childhood are in for revision. PLACIM makes a concerted effort to do so through international workshops and publications, tracing how specific childhood constructs circulate between media through time.
PLACIM has been funded through competitive research grants of the Dutch Science Foundation (NWO, Endowment for the Humanities).
Dr. E. Wesseling
Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences
Maastricht University
P.O. Box 616
6200 MD Maastricht
THE NETHERLANDS
T: 00-31-43-3883309/ 82669
F: 00-31-43-3884917