Category Archives: Conference Panel

Panel at the African Studies Association Conference 2016

Christine Whyte was invited to present a paper as part of a panel organised by Kristin Mann (Emory)  on ‘Claims-making by Slaves and Ex-slaves in African Colonial Courts: Women and Children, Family and Household’ at the 59th Annual Meeting of the African Studies Association Conference in Washington DC. Her paper, ‘Slavery in the Family: Women, Children and Violence in the Sierra Leone Courts, 1880s-1920s’ focused on disputes within families over slave wives and children in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

She also chaired a panel (pictured) on ‘Atlantic Sierra Leone: Slavery, Missionaries, and Migrants’ organised by Joseph Yannielli (Princeton University).

Childhood in Africa Stream, African Studies Association of the United Kingdom Conference, University of Cambridge, 7-9 September 2016

 

burundi-734899_1920Temilola Alanamu, a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the School of History, University of Kent and Prof Benjamin Lawrance, Hon. Barber B. Conable, Jr. Endowed Chair of International and Global Studies at the Rochester Institute of Technology will co-chair the Childhood in Africa Stream at the ASAUK conference in September 2016.

The stream is partly funded by the Department of History’s Internationalisation Award and will include sixteen participants from six countries across four panels.

The panels titled: The economy of childhood in African history, Representing the African Child in Postcolonial Africa, Evaluating Childhood, Youth and politics in colonial Africa, Child Rights and Reform in Africa will consider the histories of childhood in pre-colonial, colonial and postcolonial Africa. Contributors will examine the multiplicity of expectations, limits and experiences of childhood from the perspective of children, from the view of those with whom they came into contact, and those who contemplated their welfare on the local, national and international platform. Panels within this stream interrogate how concepts of childhoods have been defined, redefined, debated and negotiated across time, cultural and geo-political boundaries reflecting the concerns of those at the centre and margins of society. They also consider the effects of these definitions on children’s lives and their strategies for negotiating fluid boundaries in various historical contexts. Papers explore the gendered, racial and age limitations of childhood and both the changes in and resilience of childhood experiences during moments of stability, struggle, conquest and independence.

AHA Panel in Atlanta

Christine Whyte organised a panel on childhood in 19th century Sierra Leone at the 130th Annual Meeting of the American Historical Association on the 8th of January, 2016.The panel focused on the experiences of children as pupils, apprentices and domestic servants in the Colony of Sierra Leone from 1806 until the 1860s.

Panel details

“An Upright and Faithful Boy”: Children of the Elite and Children Removed from Slavery within the CMS Mission Schools, 1806–16 Katrina Keefer, York University

Emancipation and Indenture in Colonial Sierra Leone  Richard Anderson, York University

Fostering Subjects: Lives and Labour of Fostered African Children in the Sierra Leone Crown Colony Christine Whyte, University of Kent

Comment: Colleen Vasconcellos, University of West Georgia

Colonial Futures Panel at 2015 SHCY conference

Section of Totem Pole, adult figure holding a child.

Gitxsan Totem Pole (1960), Thunderbird Park, Victoria, BC, Canada. Carved by Mungo Martin, Henry Hunt, and Tony Hunt

In June 2015, Emily Manktelow organised a panel at the 2015 Society of the History of Children and Youth conference in Vancouver on the topic of: ‘Imagining Colonial Futures: Children and the Politics of Belonging in the British Colonial World’. Christine Whyte also participated in this panel, which highlighted the the role of colonial children in imagining imperial futures. The panel placed childhood experiences, and adult expectations, at the heart of British imperial history, and reflected upon the importance of histories of childhood in the politics of imperial belonging. As such it explored children’s relationship with empire, with race and difference, and with the idea and practice of the colonial lives. Christine and Emily were joined by Onni Gust (Nottingham) and local talent Laura Ishiguro (UBC) and the papers, which spanned from the remote plains of colonial British Columbia to the crowded streets of 19th-century Bombay, sparked a lively debate about the relationships between colonial settings, ideas about the future and the role of children.

PANEL: Imagining Colonial Futures: Children and the Politics of Belonging in the British Colonial World.

SHCY Eighth Biennial Conference Program University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC Wednesday, June 24 – Friday, June 26, 2015

  • Chair: Rhonda A. Semple, St. Francis Xavier University
  • “Making Missionary Children: Religion, Culture and Juvenile Deviance” Emily Manktelow, University of Kent
  • “Re-imagining belonging: children’s literature and British imperial space at the turn of the nineteenth century” Onni Gust, University of Nottingham
  • “Adopting Imperialism: Child-Care, Education and Families in 19th century Sierra Leone” Christine Whyte, Bayreuth University
  • “Children and the temporal logics of settler colonialism, British Columbia 1858-1914” Laura Ishiguro, University of British Columbia
Formal garden with lake and mountains in the background.

University of British Columbia, Canada