September 13-15, 2012

Hosted by The Janet Prindle Institute for Ethics
DePauw University, Greencastle, Indiana

Deadline for 500-word Abstracts: April 15, 2012

Organized by:
Claudia Mills, Robert and Carolyn Frederick Distinguished Visiting Professor of Ethics, DePauw University

Keynote Speakers:

Susan Campbell Bartoletti
Newbery Honor author of Hitler Youth: Growing Up in Hitler’s Shadow and They Called Themselves the KKK: The Birth of an American Terrorist Group

Claudia Nelson
Author of Family Ties in Victorian England; Little Strangers: Portrayals of Adoption in America, 1850-192;, and Boys Will Be Girls: The Feminine Ethic and British Children’s Fiction, 1857-1917

Thomas E. Wartenberg
Author of Big Ideas for Little Kids: Teaching Philosophy through Children’s Literature

Symposium Theme:

Even as children’s literature has evolved from its origins in didactic Sunday School tracts and moralizing fables, authors, parents, librarians, and scholars remain sensitive to the values conveyed to children through the texts we choose to share with them.  No field of human endeavor is exempt from some form of moral scrutiny, so ethical criticism of literature is in principle a viable approach, despite the worries it raises about censorship.  Children’s texts often explore value questions, depict moral development of their characters, and call into attention shared moral assumptions. This conference brings together children’s authors, philosophers, and scholars of children’s literature to explore ethical questions posed by children’s literature and posed about children’s literature, understood in the broadest possible sense.

Call for Papers:

Possible topics for papers include, but are not limited to:

• Ethics in fantasy versus ethics in “realistic” stories
• Values – concerning personal morality, social justice, or gender, race, and class – conveyed by any particular work or series
• How children’s literature both reflects and shapes moral development
• The role of moral emotions in children’s books (anger, resentment, forgiveness, etc.)
• Children’s books in which generally admirable characters behave in arguably immoral ways (lying, cheating, stealing)
• Moral dilemmas faced by characters in children’s literature
• Ethical criticism of children’s literature
• Recent controversies over whether young adult literature is “too dark”
• How moralizing is handled in children’s literature in different historical periods

Papers should be twenty minutes reading time (10 pages).

Send to claudiamills@depauw.edu

For more information, please visit eclconference.org

2nd Global Conference
The Child: A Persons Project

Saturday 7th July 2012 – Monday 9th July 2012
Mansfield College, Oxford, United Kingdom

 

Call for Papers: 

After a hiatus of one year, the Childhood Project is returning. This inter-disciplinary and multi-disciplinary conference project seeks to investigate and explore all aspects of childhood. The period of life prior to adulthood is one of dramatic change and development of physical, intellectual, psychological, and many other types of characteristics. The nature of childhood and its significance as a
separate phase of life, however, is viewed quite differently in different cultures and in different historical eras. This conference will look at all aspects of the experience of childhood as well as the social and cultural perceptions of children and childhood. We encourage submissions on any theme to do with the nature of childhood, including, but not limited to the ones listed below.

1. Definitions of Childhood

* How has the concept of childhood developed over time?

* How is childhood viewed differently across different cultures and eras?

* What are the boundaries of childhood? (Are children made to grow up too fast? Are mature people infantilized by definitions of the boundaries of childhood?)

* Is ‘childhood’ a singular category or is it composed of quite distinct multiple categories? How does defining childhood also define adulthood and vice versa?

2. Childhood and Development

* What are the important aspects of physical, psychological, emotional, intellectual, moral, social, etc. development in childhood?

* How do institutions (like schools, medical centres, and even legal systems) effectively nurture the unique developmental needs of children?

* How has our understanding of childhood as a period of development changed over time? Are there ways we are still getting it significantly wrong?

3. Children and Relationships

* What are the dynamics of children’s relationships with their family, peers, and their community?

* How are children’s social relationships either experienced positively or negatively?

* What are the dynamics of children’s relationships with social institutions (like schools and religious organizations)?

* What is the nature of children’s relationships with animals and nature?

4. Perceptions and Depictions of Childhood

* How do adults perceive children and childhood?

* How do they perceive the capabilities, responsibilities, and privileges of childhood?

* How do they perceive their own experiences of childhood? (With nostalgia? embarrassment? amusement?)

* How do children perceive themselves?

* How are children and childhood depicted in academia and in the media such as art, literature, film, television, advertising, etc.?

5. Other Issues of Childhood

* Children and education: What issues are the concerning how children are educated?

* Children and leisure: How is involvement in recreational activities (including sports) either beneficial or harmful to children?

* Children and the law: Does the criminal justice system effectively deal with children both as victims of crime and as perpetrators of crime?

* Children and rights: What rights do children have in virtue of being children? To what extent must the choices of children be respected?

* Children and gender: How are children socialized into gender-specific roles? What are the issues and concerns connected to how children form gender and sexual identities?

* What is the nature of children’s relationship to the world of work?

* Childhood in transition: how does adolescence bridge the child/adult world and to what extent are adolescents caught in a double-bind of being children and being adults?

The Steering Group welcomes the submission of pre-formed panel proposals. 300 word abstracts should be submitted by Friday 13th January 2012. If an abstract is accepted for the conference, a full draft paper should be submitted by Friday 11th May 2012.300 word abstracts should be submitted simultaneously to both Organising Chairs; abstracts may be in Word, WordPerfect, or RTF formats with the following information and in this order:

a) author(s), b) affiliation, c) email address, d) title of abstract,
e) body of abstract, f) up to 10 key wordsE-mails should be entitled: CHILD2 Abstract Submission.

 

Please use plain text (Times Roman 12) and abstain from using footnotes and any special formatting, characters or emphasis (such as bold, italics or underline). Please note that a Book of Abstracts is
planned for the end of the year. All accepted abstracts will be included in this publication. We acknowledge receipt and answer to all paper proposals submitted. If you do not receive a reply from us in a week you should assume we did not receive your proposal; it might be lost in cyberspace! We suggest, then, to look for an alternative electronic route or resend.

 

Joint Organising Chairs:

Wendy Turgeon
Project Leader
St. Joseph’s College,
New York, USA
Email: turgeon@optonline.net

Rob Fisher
Network Founder and Leader, Inter-Disciplinary.Net
Freeland, Oxfordshire,
United Kingdom
Email: child2@inter-disciplinary.net

 

The conference is part of the Probing the Boundaries programme of research projects. It aims to bring together people from different areas and interests to share ideas and explore various discussions which are innovative and exciting.

All papers accepted for and presented at this conference will be eligible for publication in an ISBN eBook. Selected papers maybe invited for development for publication in a themed hard copy volume(s).

For further details of the project, please visit:
http://www.inter-disciplinary.net/probing-the-boundaries/persons/childhood/

For further details of the conference, please visit:
http://www.inter-disciplinary.net/probing-the-boundaries/persons/childhood/call-for-papers/

Please note: Inter-Disciplinary.Net is a not-for-profit network and we are not in a position to be able to assist with conference travel or subsistence.

There is now an email list affiliated with PLATO. This is an open discussion list for exchange among those with interests in the development and practice of pre-college philosophy, with particular emphasis on developing this field in the United States.

To join the list, subscribe at: http://lists.futurenode.com/mailman/listinfo/plato-apa_lists.futurenode.com/

Philosophy Talk, a weekly, one-hour radio series produced at Stanford University, taped a show about philosophy for children at the University of Washington that aired on December 19. The show involved a discussion by Philosophy Talk hosts Ken Taylor and John Perry, both philosophers at Stanford University, and guest Jana Mohr Lone from the Northwest Center for Philosophy for Children at the University of Washington, with 4th grade students from John Muir Elementary School in Seattle, that examined some classic philosophical questions about mind/body, personal identity, and the nature of happiness.

To listen, click here

You can also hear a discussion about introducing philosophy to pre-college students between Jana Mohr Lone, director of University of Washington’s Northwest Center for Philosophy for Children, and Ross Reynolds from the radio show “The Conversation,” on Seattle NPR station KUOW, by clicking here.