In order to substantiate its platform function, PLACIM has organized various successive international workshops:

1.       Maastricht University, Maastricht, the Netherlands, August 2011. The Child Savage: From Comics to Games.

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.

2.        Reading University, Reading, UK, August 2012. The Multiple Cycles of Children’s Media: Childhood Nostalgia in Contemporary Convergence Culture.

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?

3.       Maastricht University, Maastricht, the Netherlands, August 2013. The Glocalization of Children’s Commodities

This workshop is about designing a follow-up project for PLACIM to work on through international collaboration. See “plans for the near future”.

4.        University of Antwerp, Antwerp, Belgium, May 2015. Connecting Childhood and Old Age in Popular Media.

This workshop explored the conceptual metaphor “Children are like Old People” (and vice versa) in diverse media from an international perspective.

Convenor: Vanessa Joosen.

5.        University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark, oktober 2015, Towards a Marie Curie Innovative Training Network Application.

This workshop was devoted to acquainting the PLACIM participants with the format and challenges of developing a MC ITN application.

Convenor:  Helle Strandgaard Jensen.

6.       Maastricht University, Maastricht, the Netherlands,  september 2016, Citizenship Education Through Childhood Heritage.

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

7.       Maastricht University, Maastricht, the Netherlands, September 2017, Citizenship Education Through Childhood Heritage, II.

This workshop was devoted to resubmitting a Marie Curie Innovative Training Network Application in January 2018.

Convenor: Elisabeth Wesseling.