Osiris, Volume 41

Converges the fields of childhood studies and the histories of science, medicine, and technology, foregrounding and investigating the entangled histories of the “child” and childhood and science.

Building on the premise that neither childhood nor science are natural, essential, or universalizable entities, this Osiris volume examines the interrelation of these two categories tracing back to the Middle Ages and up until the present. Organized around three major themes—theorizing and historicizing the category of childhood and child agency, the technologies and politics of child health, and the co-constitutive relationship between the concept of the child and childhood and the realm of science—the issue traverses time, space, cultures, bodies, and disciplines. The contributions explore the role that science, technology, and medicine played in constructing how the ideology of childhood shaped ideas about scientific thinking and practices, e.g., the psy-sciences, sexology, filmology, medicine, health technology; and how the entanglement between the “child” and science influenced the formation of national identity, selfhood, colonial rule, resistance, and the notions of “progress” and the “future.” Using the “child” as an analytical category and considering children as fully-fledged historical actors allows us to retell and re-present (the history of) science through a wide range of sources, and in turn, reimagine our understandings of agency, governance, subjectivity, human nature, and what science owes the “child” and children.