Visual Anthropology of Childhood

Århus - Danmark

28 - 29 August 2010

Symposium

PERCEIVING CHILDREN is a two-days symposium 28-30. August 2010 held in conjunction with the 30th NAFA International Festival of Ethnographic Film at Moesgård Museum in Århus.

Children are the future of the world we live in. If cinema and photography have poignantly captured childhood’s ideas, stereotypes, sociality and relation to other age groups, they have often idealized childhood and children from adult-centred perspectives and fantasies. If childhood is merely a cultural construction, which can be approached through a certain dose of relativism and with the help of discourse analysis, children as subjects have often been marginalized in social research, and children as social actors have produced representations that are often considered ephemeral and unachieved because of their transitory age. Moreover, many museums have had children as their primary target audience and they have often designed interesting exhibitions where children can actively take part and interact with the display, but sometimes they have applied the “child-spectator” as a model for all types of exhibitions and audiences, hence reducing the potential of intergenerational exchange and agency.

In this symposium we wish to investigate the state of affairs around the following subjects: Children and childhood as represented in media anthropology and museums. Children perceiving and children perceived. We aim at designing a symposium where mixed-media representations of, by or involving the active participation of children are in focus, within a larger framework of social scientific research and museology.