Cape Town, South Africa ~ Delhi, India ~ Baltimore, USA |
Workshop 1: Foundations The first Child on the Wing workshop was held on November 15, 2003, and took the essay that outlines the project as its starting point. Graduate students and faculty from Johns Hopkins University met with invited guests for a discussion on theoretical questions that arise from a commitment to a child-centred view of the everyday in contexts of social, economic and political vulnerability. The invited guests included Jill Korbin (Case Western Reserve University), Lauren Berlant (University of Chicago), Daniel Hoffman (Duke University), Patti Henderson (HIVAN Center, University of Natal), and Lori Leonard (Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health). The workshop took as its central theme the ability of poor people, including children and youth, to weld together disparate spheres of opportunity within the economy and the polity — both children’s labour (all forms of labour including the work of war) and political survival (including notions of childhood, rights, violence and inequality). Presentations were delivered from the project’s conveners, Veena Das (“What is it to hope? Children and poverty in urban India”) and Pamela Reynolds (“Ethnography of the child with regard to the anxiety of violence, labour and the joy of living”), and from invited guests, with case studies from Africa, South Asia and the US. Daniel Hoffman spoke on child soldiers and the role of Kamajor militia in the wars in Sierra Leone and Liberia, and Patti Henderson’s account of an isolated community in the Drakensberg Mountains provided grounds for challenging common anthropological depictions of “orphaned children.” Henderson spoke on the creativity, compassion and resistance of children within contexts of poverty and HIV/AIDS, to emphasize community coherence, support and beauty at times of loss. A report of the workshop by James Williams was printed in the American Anthropological Association’s monthly publication, Anthropology News (Volume 45, Number 1, January 2004). [Workshop information and schedule]
The second Child on the Wing workshop, on December 3, 2004, focussed on questions of security in the lives of young people, and examined how notions of security circulate through institutions and families, love and care, through resources and economies. Invited speakers included Stefania Pandolfo (University of California, Berkeley), Olga Nieuwenhuys (University of Amsterdam) and Neil Boothby (Columbia University). Pamela Reynolds chaired the workshop and delivered opening comments. Veena Das concluded the workshop, reflecting upon themes and questions raised during the discussions, offering some directions to how Child on the Wing might channel future energy. Ross Parsons and Jason Hart, Child on the Wing Rockefeller Research Fellows, presented proposals for their fieldwork. Three graduate students from the anthropology department at Johns Hopkins (Sylvain Perdigon, Lauren Heidbrink, and James Williams) served as discussants to the invited speakers, responding to the presentations and opening discussion. Representatives of USAID, Christian Children’s Fund and Search for Common Ground attended the workshop. Numerous lines of discussion from the workshop were particularly provocative. Neil Boothby presented the results of an innovative longitudinal-study of former ‘child soldiers’ in Mozambique, charting the trajectories of forty young people from their participation in combat to their disarmament and beyond. Olga Nieuwenhuys, who spoke broadly on the economics of child labour and the ways in which morality and notions of the normal and the pathological come to be attached to institutional categories and scholarly terms, fuelled critical questions of the interventions made on children’s behalf by state and state-like actors. Stefania Pandolfo’s ethnography of illegal youth migration to Europe from Morocco, which she described as a continuous ‘gamble with life’ (Mghamar b-l-hayat), explored particular ways in which risk and future are articulated by young adults within a context of restricted movement. Moroccan youth describe their ontological lack of place in terms of a philosophical despair, a loss of trust in God, a ‘slow death’. These young people “imagine death on a plane in which there is a possibility of life only in non-existential terms,” Pandolfo claimed. [Workshop information and schedule]
The third Child on the Wing workshop will be held in December 2005. It takes off from Michael Fischer’s notion of “emergent forms of life”, and invites exploration of aspects of such emergence in relation to experiences of children and youth. Excellent contributions by Michael Fischer, Michael Moon, and Joao Biehl, each of whom took up the question of emergence in creative ways. Michael Fischer's work on the figure of the child in Iranian cinema formed the ground for an examination of the forms of life that novel analytical frames provide in alternative perspectives on the child. Joao Biehl's discussion of the maps of children, particularly within Deleuzian terms, proved provocative, as did Michael Moon's explorations into children's drawings as a way into rethinking "the child" from non-adult perspectives. Exciting responses from graduate students included James Williams, Sylvain Perdigon, Hester Betlem and Bican Polat, each of whom raised pointed challenges to the works presented and to received notions of the category of the child. [Workshop information and schedule]
The fourth and final workshop to be held in Baltimore occurred in October 2006 on the theme of Moral Creativity. Six short-term fellows were invited from a large pool of applicants to participate in a weeklong workshop in which they were asked to develop their work in reponse to a range of contributions from guest speakers and Hopkins faculty and students. Veena Das presented work on 'the unstable categories of childhood', drawing on years of field data from India to discuss the ways in which the young are themselves sources of moral creativity, rather than merely receiving or being inducted into moral orders. Zolani Ngwane, from Haverford College, posed questions around the category of youth in South Africa in thinking through the various scenes of instruction that they found themselves in during and after Apartheid. Deborah Poole, of the Johns Hopkins Anthropology faculty, recounted scenes from her recent fieldwork in Mexico in which questions surface about the capacity for the law to frame the moral in a time of sudden upheaval. Anand Pandian's richly ethnographic presentation on ethics and action in an agrarian setting in southern India stimulated excellent discussion on the question of moral creativity. During the week, the six short-term fellows and the four long-term fellows presented their work alongside that of our guest speakers, and each was given a considered response by a member of the Johns Hopkins Anthropology Department. Juan Obarrio, Sameena Mulla, Aaron Goodfellow and James Williams all made incisive contributions in their reflections on the papers. JHU faculty, Fanella Cannell and Naveeda Khan, responded to the work of the long-term fellows and opended up strong questions about methodology and the practice of conducting fieldwork along new lines of enquiry that take up the question of the child within mobile trajectories of children's lives under the conditions of ongoing political violence and economic uncertainty. [Workshop information and Workshop schedule ] | ||||
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