Knowledge of childhood: materiality, text, and the history of science – an interdisciplinary round table discussion

This roundtable discussion takes the diversity of discourse and practice shaping modern knowledge about childhood as an opportunity to engage with recent historiographical approaches in the history of science. It draws attention to symmetries and references among scientific, material, literary and artistic cultures and their respective forms of knowledge. The five participating scholars come from various fields in the humanities and social sciences and illustrate historiographical and methodological questions at a range of examples: Topics include the emergence of children’s rooms in US consumer magazines; research on the unborn in nineteenth century sciences of development; the framing of autism in nascent child psychiatry; German literary discourses about the child’s initiation in scripture; and the socio-politics of racial identity in the photographic depiction of African American infant corpses in the early twentieth century. Throughout the course of the paper, childhood emerges as a topic particularly prone to interdisciplinary perspectives that consider the history of science part of a broader history of knowledge.