Culture, Ideology, Modernity
Seminar and doctoral course
Second seminar in the seminar series on
Childhood – Agency, Culture, Society
Trondheim, 23 – 24 September 2002
Program
Monday 23 September
Auditorium 1, Idrettssenteret
13.00–14.00Chris Jenks: Childhood and Transgression
14.00–14.30Coffee break
14.30–15.30Heinz Hengst: Complex Interconnections.
The Global and the Local in Children's Minds and Everyday Worlds
15.30–15.45Break
15.45–16.45Daniel Cook: Subjectifying the Child Consumer
(or, How Markets Make Persons in the Consumer Culture of Childhood)
Tuesday 24 September
Auditorium VI, Building 5
09.00–10.00Discussants: Leo B. Hendry, Håkon Leiulfsrud and Kari Moxnes
(to be announced)
10.00–12.00Open discussion
12.00–13.30Lunch
13.30–16.00Supervision of doctoral students
The seminar is open to everyone who is interested in the topic. The language will be English. The lecturers will take part in the discussions on the second day. It is expected that all seminar participants, including doctoral students, attend not only the sessions on Monday but also the sessions on Tuesday morning.
Introduction to the second seminar in the seminar series
Culture, ideology and modernity – each of the concepts in the title of this second seminar are well known words in current discourses, but what do they signify – in particular as related to childhood?
Children’s roles are increasingly discussed in modern society and opinions about them abound. Is culture – to paraphrase a well-known dictum – opium for children or children’s opium? Do children – or should we rather speak about childhood or the child – have agency in ideological struggles about their own present or future life or are they rather pawns for alternative projects of other and more powerful players?
Child, children, childhood are words – phenomena? – burdened with conflicting symbolic value, that may or may not materialise in various forms of presentations. Interpretations always have an impact on their targets; however, their instigators may, in the process, become objects and victims of their own games, while leaving children in the lurch.
All people to all times live in the latest ‘modernity’, but can one say that a child is modern, or is s/he rather an archaism loaded with nostalgia and/or promise – one (so far without gender) to be equipped with self-agency? Yet, the child will more or less consciously resist and thus contribute to determining the pace and form of social development.
The issues implicated in the theme of this seminar are as difficult, exiting and perhaps opaque as these introductory words indicate. They will be approached and made transparent in different ways by the invited seminar lecturers: Chris Jenks will be seeking a way between children as icons and messengers of the ongoing social order and their actual behaviour which sometimes transgresses this order. Do childhood transgressions ever raise critical questions about the assumptions upon which the dominant order rests? Daniel Cook will be suggesting that the figure of ‘the child’ is used as an instrument in increasingly commodified environments at the same time as the child is empowered in terms of being a subject in the market; it is a typical clash between the sacred and the profane that questions the fiction of the ‘innocent child’ to the advantage of a worldly agent. Heinz Hengst will be demonstrating how the global is brought to bear on the local through the cultural domain as a medium and how this is impacting both childhood and the identity of the collective subject of social childhood studies. A critical analysis of the binary concept generation shall be used as a means to achieving this.
Experienced Norwegian researchers have agreed to make assessments and critiques of the lectures in order to bring about a qualified start of the debate on the second day. Each participant is invited and encouraged to take part in the discussion. This holds not least for students who may be using the previous evening to prepare themselves for questions and comments.
Lecturers
Daniel Cookreceived his Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Chicago in 1998. His work examines the ongoing cultural transactions between childhood and the commercial realm. In a state of tension, but not necessarily in a state of opposition with one another, markets and children co-exist and co-create each other in a variety of ways. Cook’s work to date has been mainly historical examining the rise of the child-consumer, as well as more contemporary treatments of such things as Pokemon, children’s retail spaces and food. Professor Cook is editor of Symbolic Childhood (2002 Peter Lang) and author of a number of articles addressing the commodification of childhood. He is preparing a manuscript on the rise of children as consumers in the context of the US children’s wear industry in the twentieth century to be published by Duke University Press.
Chris Jenks, Professor of Sociology and Director of Centre for Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths College University of London, UK. Among his books are: The Sociology of Childhood (1982 London: Batsford); Culture (1993 London: Routledge); Childhood (1996 London: Routledge); Theorising Childhood [with James & Prout] (1998 Oxford: Polity); Transgression (2003 London: Routledge, in production and forthcoming). He has also published numerous articles and chapters in books on topics as diverse as criminology, urban sociology, cultural sociology, sociological theory and childhood. His interests are in sociological theory, post-structuralism and heterology, childhood, cultural theory, visual and urban culture, and the extremes of behaviour. Moreover, Jenks is co-editor of the journal Childhood.
Heinz Hengst studied philosophy, sociology and German literature. He is Professor of Social and Cultural Sciences at the Fachbereich Sozialwesen, Hochschule Bremen, Germany, and a member of the Institut für Popular- und Kinderkultur at Universität Bremen. Since 1999 he is Chair of the Sociology of Childhood section in the German Association of Sociology. He has done work on childhood matters for more than 20 years now. He is author, editor and co-editor of numerous books and articles mainly concerning questions of contemporary childhood and children’s culture(s).
Discussants
Associate Professor Håkon Leiulfsrud (Department of Sociology and Political Science, NTNU), Professor Leo B. Hendry (Norwegian Centre for Child Research, NTNU) and Professor Kari Moxnes (Department of Sociology and Political Science, NTNU) have kindly agreed to open the discussion on the second day with due reference to the lectures on the first day.
Practical information
The seminar will take place at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) at Dragvoll (about 8 km. south east of the centre of Trondheim), in Auditorium 1, at Idretts-senteret on Monday the 23rd and in Auditorium VI, Building 5 on Tuesday the 24th. For further information about the location of the auditoriums, please visit Bus numbers 8, 9 and 66/36 provide transportation between the centre of Trondheim and NTNU, Dragvoll. Bus schedule can be found at this address
While there is no seminar fee, the participants are, however, expected to cover their own accommodation and board. The following centrally located hotels offer special rooms rates when the participants refer to the seminar which is arranged by NOSEB at NTNU: Radisson SAS Royal Garden Hotel, Comfort Hotel Augustin, Clarion Gran Olav Hotel, Britannia Hotel, Comfort Home Hotel Bakeriet. For more detailed information about accommodation, kindly contact the organisers.
A complimentary lunch will be offered to participants on Tuesday 24 September (please re-gister on the attached form or by e-mail).
If you have not earlier contacted the organisers for information about the seminar series and would like to be kept informed about the series, please note the contact addresses:
Postal address: Norwegian Centre for Child Research, NTNU, 7491 Trondheim, Norway
E-mail address: , tel: +47 73596244, fax: +4773596239
Please also visit for updated information about the seminars.
Doctoral courses
A list of seminar literature will be sent to each attending doctoral student, who will be expected to have read the publications prior to the seminar. He/she must inform the organisers about the requirements of the doctoral course at his/her home institute in terms of, for instance, making a presentation and/or writing an essay related to the theme of one of the seminars, as the case may be.
Doctoral students are asked to submit to the organisers a 5-800 word abstract of the proposal for their doctoral project or any other brief project summary. Attendance of the doctoral course should be acknowledged at their home institute/faculty.
Doctoral students who wish to attend seminar 2 and have not yet registered, are kindly requested to fill in the attached form and send it to Norwegian Centre for Child Research as soon as possible.
Organisers:
The seminar is organised by Norwegian Centre for Child Research (Professor Jens Qvortrup and Senior Executive Officer Karin Ekberg) and financially supported by the Research Council of Norway.
Culture, Ideology, Modernity
Doctoral course
Form to be filled in by doctoral students who wish to attend the doctoral course and who have not earlier registered.
Name:…………………………………………………………………………………………...
Institutional affiliation:………………………………………………………………………..
Address:. ……………………………………………………………………………………….
…………………………………………………………………………………………………..
E-mail address:………………………………………………………………………………...
Telephone:……………………………………..Fax…………………………………………..
Lunch on Tuesday 24 September (complimentary)
Please send you registration to:
Norwegian Centre for Child Research
NTNU
7491 Trondheim
Norway
tel: +47 73596240, fax +4773596239
email:
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