Call for Papers: Children and War, 04/04
Children and War
The Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis (RCHA) will
host a conference on April 7-9, 2005. Our focus will be
upon children: as victims, participants, and survivors
of war, children in war torn states and regions of the
world as well as children of aggressor nations who may
escape the immediate physical terror of war but suffer
other traumas. We invite scholars from a variety of
disciplines to contribute to a global, historical and
cross-cultural understanding of war and children.
Robert J. Liftons classic study of Japanese child
victims of the atomic bomb, along with recent Holocaust
studies and memoirs, serve as powerful treatments of
children as victims and survivors. We wish to amplify
and enrich the story, carrying it forward in time and
backwards into the past, offering understandings of
children as participants and actors in the human
history of violence and inviting policy-makers to
understand more fully the consequences of war upon
children. Do modern warfare, advanced weaponry and
technology, and the coming to existence of the modern
state, and stateless terrorism create a unique
situation for dependent, developing humans as victims
of and participants in war? How have religious,
ethical, and political beliefs justified the sacrifices
of youth? How can we conceptualize the impact of war
upon boys and girls?
For the past 13 years, RCHA conferences have followed a
highly successful format that will also be used for
this meeting as well. The conference begins Thursday
evening and runs through Saturday afternoon. Advance
circulation of papers and no concurrent sessions allow
maximum discussion time and full participation in all
conference proceedings. The twenty-or-so fellows
assembled for the academic year at the RCHA, including
visiting, associate, faculty, and graduate fellows will
join the invited colloquium participants. We shall seek
publication of conference papers, as the RCHA has done
successfully in the past. The conference will be held
on the Douglass Campus of Rutgers University.
This conference is part of a larger project entitled
Gendered Passages in Historical Perspective: The
Gendering of Children that runs throughout the academic
year 2004-2005 at the RCHA. Under the direction of
Professors Rudolph M. Bell and Virginia Yans-McLaughlin
of the Rutgers-New Brunswick History Department, this
project focuses on the evolution of cultural
understandings of gender and childrens management of
these humanly constructed understandingswith the goal
of developing educational tools to encourage future
policymakers to make the present and future lives of
boy and girl children productive, safe, and equally
satisfying.
Contacts:
Lynn Shanko
Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis
88 College Avenue
New Brunswick, NJ 08901
(732) 932-8701 phone
(732) 932-8708 fax
Email: rcha@rci.rutgers.edu
Visit the website at http://rcha.rutgers.edu
Page Editor: Ali B. Ali-Dinar, Ph.D.