Events

The Anthropology of Children and Youth Network has organised monthly seminars since its founding in June 2009. Researchers and practitioners from across the globe have presented their work during these meetings which aim to advance theory, methods, and ethics in the field of anthropology of children and youth. The seminars are attended by participants from the Netherlands and beyond. Please feel free to contact the network convenors if you are interested in sharing your research, ideas and experiences.

Upcoming events

Hybrid Methological seminar. Contributions of the anthropology of childhood: ‘Our ties, their ties: what are the emotional issues with children?'/« Nos attachements, leurs attachements : quels enjeux émotionnels avec les enfants ? » (XVI)
December, 19, 9:00-12:00

Élodie Razy, Viola Teisenhoffer and Andrea Zuppi are organizing a call for papers at the next Conference of the "Société Internationale d'Ethnologie et de Folklore" (SIEF), to be held in Aberdeen from June 3 to 6, 2025.

The panel is entitled “Unwriting adult's knowledge? Giving voice to children's epistemologies in ritualized contexts and play” (abstract and description below).

Proposals can be submitted online. Proposals must be submitted no later than December 17, 2024.

Élodie Razy, Viola Teisenhoffer and Andrea Zuppi

Past events

Event posterHybrid roundtable: "Corps d'enfants et d'adolescents sous contrôle: modeler, contenir, légiferer" / "Children's and adolescent's bodies under control: modelling, containing and legislating"
3 December, 13:30-17:00 CET
Université Paris Cité, Campus Saint-Germain-des-Près, 45 rue des Saints Pères, 75006, Paris.

Those wishing to participate online can obtain the Zoom link by writing to Alice Sophie Sarcinelli: alice.sarcinelli@u-paris.fr

The roundtable participants are:

Workshop - Children and Rituals. Subjects, actors or objects? - Vth edition
Monday 3rd June 2024, University of Liège, Belgium

The fifth edition of the ‘Children and Rites’ workshop, the fruit of extensive inter-faculty and inter-institutional collaboration, addressed children's relationship with objects and materiality in an interdisciplinary round-table discussion. It began with a talk by historian Antoine Mandret-Degeilh (LaSSP, University of Toulouse), entitled “The little ones in front? Childhood in civil baptisms in France and Germany (20th-21st centuries

Interdisciplinary round table on children’s relationship to objects and materiality in rituals

As in previous editions, this workshop continued the study of children’s participation in rituals, whether the rituals under consideration belong to established religions, emerging spiritualities, or the secular world (educational institutions, care facilities, leisure activities, etc.). The initial anthropological approach developed in previous meetings was combined with those of history and the sciences of education. This year’s theme is children’s relationship to objects and materiality in rituals. Several lines of inquiry were proposed: toys on the border between play and ritual; children’s relationship to ornaments (body shaping/adornment, children as creators); objects as attributes that construct and indicate a (changing) status related to age, gender, or a period of transition; objects as (sensory, emotional, etc.) learning aids for ritual practices; children’s relationship to musical instruments; objects as a sources of pleasure or desire (gifts, food giving etc.). Questions related to children’s handling of objects during rituals, or to the association of objects with children, stimulated the exchange. We thus reflected on what children do with objects, and what objects do to children in the contexts of everyday or institutionalised rituals, in an interdisciplinary dialogue open to the diversity of methodological approaches as well as disciplinary and theoretical perspectives.

Organizing committee
Neyra Alvarado Solís • PEA, El Colegio de San Luis A.C
Marie Daugey • LASC, ULiège
Marie Housen • RUCHE, PERF, FPLSE, ULiège
Florence Pirard • RUCHE, PERF, FPLSE, ULiège
Élodie Razy • IRSS-LASC, FaSS, ULiège
Charles-Édouard de Suremain • UMR 208 PALOC, IRD-MNHN
Philippe Swennen • Mondes anciens, FPL, ULiège
Viola Teisenhoffer • IRSS-LASC, FaSS, ULiège

Link to French version

 

Methological seminar. "Insights from anthropology of childhood" (XV)
December 20, 18:00-20:00 (online)

Read more here.

 

Round Table "Enfance(s) et anthropologie: dialogues croisés" (Multiple views on childhood(s) and anthropology)
December, 4th 2023 (1:30-5:00 P.M.)

Centre Universitaires Saints Pères, 45, rue Saints Pères 75006 Paris salle R229
Organized in the cycle of scientific interdisciplinary events "Childhood(s)" in collaboration with the “Anthropology of childhood and youth network” of the European Association for Social Anthropology" and Gis Proson.
Further information on the event here

 

After the successful workshop “Giving research feedback to children: beyond ready-made recipes and asymmetric relationships” held in June 2023, the Anthropology of Children and Youth Network invites you to visit the digital exhibition connecting arts and sciences to give research feedback to children and young people. For more information French speakers can read more at this webpage and watch this video.

Workshop: Giving research feedback to children: beyond ready-made recipes and asymmetric relationships
5-6 June 2023, University of Liege

Bringing together social scientists who do fieldwork with children or young people and wish to renew the methodology and the sense of their feedback of research results, we aim at working in a collaborative and innovative way by cross-cutting fields and disciplines (specifically, anthropology and art). Methodological publications usually include ready-made tools. While they make it possible to avoid the worst, they often do not consider the overall social and cultural context in which children live; they may also be adults-centered and based on stereotypical representations of childhood.

This workshop based on previous activities and publications addresses questions such as: can research be “returned” to the children and young people with whom the anthropologist has worked as well as to children in general, and what are the form and purpose of the feedback? Can an epistemologically justified and ethically founded feedback make it possible to overcome asymmetric and dichotomic relationships? During a day and a half, participants will exchange in order to help each other to elaborate a visual or performance-based feedback of their research grounded in the daily life of children and youth, their communication codes and potential expectations.

The opening conference and the exhibition that will be held at the end of the workshop, and then digitally shown, are open to the public.

Workshop Children and Rites. Subjects, actors or objects?
IV. Children in rites in Mesoamerica and elsewhere
9 December 2022

The “Children and Rites” workshop aims to promote a field of research exploring rites, religious facts and social worlds at the intersection of the anthropology of childhood and children and general anthropology. The children’s involvment in rituals is approached from an exploratory questioning: are children the subjects, the actors or the objects of the rites in which they take part?

Read more here:
English
French

2018 seminars

Methodological Seminar – Insights from Anthropology of Childhood (X) – Back to method. Assessment and anthropological perspectives, Belgium December 18, 2018 & Mexico January 31, 2019

The seminar's colour poster and full text and programme are now available for download as a single PDF here.

Methodological Seminar –  What do children bring to the reflection on heritage ? Cross-perspectives (Africa-America), France December 14, 2018

The seminar's colour poster and programme are now available for download as a single PDF here.

Methodological Seminar – Insights from Anthropology of Childhood (IX) – Children and kinship: Just a matter of learning?, Mexico, April 16-17, 2018 & Belgium April 26-27, 2018

The seminar's colour poster and full text and programme are now available for download as a single PDF here.


2016 Seminars

 

2015 Seminars

 

2014 Lectures

In 2014, the Network held its monthly seminar meetings (a list of seminars is provided below), in addition Dr Sandra J.T.M. Evers gave the following lectures:

2014 List of monthly seminars

15 December 2014
Documentary ‘Play no matter what!’ and the concept of Social Circus
Kim van Haaster, director and producer of documentaries at Kim van Haaster Audiovisuele Producties

Kim van Haaster will introduce the concept of Social Circus that is closely related to the topic of the documentary ‘Play no matter what!’. The documentary was made in Romania in 2013. After the screening there is time for questions.

Synopsis
Rachitoasa is the hilly hometown of Alexandra and Noni, two Romanian teenagers at the age of fourteen. There is not much else to do in Rachitoasa but to go school, work the land, help out in the household, or hang out on the streets. But one glorious day a bunch of funny looking, foreign people come to live in their village and stay a while. They turn the abandoned and rundown school building down the road into a colorful place for them to play! Ash and Jolien and the two teenagers become friends and hand-in-hand they play and figure out what they are good at and what is valuable in life. Playing is the most powerful way of learning, no matter the circumstances.

14 November 2014
Moving across languages and learning traditions
Leslie C. Moore, associate professor of Teaching & Learning and Linguistics at The Ohio State University, and Fulbright Scholar at Universiteit Utrecht

In this talk I present an overview of my research on the social and cultural patterning of children's language learning in communities whose members use multiple languages and participate in multiple language traditions. I examine such patterning in three multilingual African communities. Fist, I discuss language learning and use in a village in the Mandara Mountains, identifying several features of social life that worked together to reproduce and reinforce norms of multilingualism. Second, I examine Fulbe children's socialization into Fulfulde, Arabic, and French across secular, religious, and domestic activity settings. Third, I discuss Somali-American children's experiences of language learning and double schooling (participation in Qu'ranic and public schooling). In studying African children's experiences and developmental trajectories as learners and users of multiple languages across contexts, I seek to expand and deepen our understanding of how everyday practices shape language learning in culturally distinctive ways that may be transformed over time and space.

16 October 2014
Researching and reporting on human trafficking with a particular focus on the trafficking of minors
Ieke de Vries, researcher at the office of the Dutch National Rapporteur on Trafficking in Human Beings and Sexual Violence against Children

There is increasing awareness of human trafficking in the Netherlands and at the international level. To tackle a hidden problem such as human trafficking, it must be made visible. A complicating matter is that human trafficking can take different forms, it can occur for different reasons, and individual trackers as well as criminal organization may be involved. The way governments or non-governmental organizations assess the criminal component also determines what measures will be taken to combat it. And even though there is more awareness, questions remain like: What is the role of researchers (both quantitative and qualitative) studying human trafficking and how do they contribute to the question of visibility? By means of concrete examples on human trafficking - with a focus on the trafficking of minors, the seminar will look into the various ways for researching the phenomenon.

15 September 2014
M ‘ - t s a e h t u o S l a r u r n i g n i g n o l e b d n a m s i l a t i p a c l a t i g i d , h t u o y , s e n o h p e l i b o M ? m s i l a n o i t a
NAsia’ Roy Huijsmans, senior lecturer Children & Youth Studies, ISS, The Hague, The Netherlands

Mobile phone use has become a defining feature of what it means to be young. This is no less true in the relatively remote, ethnic minority spaces of the Lao-Vietnamese borderland area that is the focus of this study. Drawing on Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities, I investigate the interplay between mobile phones, being young and digital capitalism and how this reconfigures belonging. In doing so, I focus on ethnic minority youth's appropriation of the mobile services provided by Viettel, the most popular mobile service provider in the study area and owned by the Vietnamese Ministry of Defence. I argue that the nationalism embedded in the digital capitalism of the corporate dimension of the post-socialist state (i.e. Viettel) enters young people's lives and transforms ethnic minority spaces in profound ways and that a rereading of Anderson's work in the digital age offers new ground for understanding the formation of nationalism in a distinct generational fashion.

16 June 2014
'Generationing' development: Furthering the conversation'
Lidewyde Berckmoes, Sandra Evers, Shanti George, Roy Huijsmans, Sharada Srinivasan, Ben White

This seminar will take the form of a roundtable discussion about a recent Special Issue (2014; 26(2)) publication of the European Journal of Development Studies entitled ‘Generationing Development: Situating children and youth in development processes’. The publication takes issue with the categorising approach towards children and youth that predominates in development studies, policy and practice. Instead, the contributing papers employ a relational understanding of children and youth in development and tease out how processes of development are oftentimes distinctly generationed dynamics. In this seminar, the guesteditors will briefly introduce the central premises of the publication, and some contributing authors will critically reflect on how these ideas have informed their article as well as the scope and limitations of the idea of ‘generationing’ development.

19 May 2014
Human trafficking is happening here in the Netherlands
Corinne Dettmeijer-Vermeulen, Dutch National Rapporteur on Trafficking in Human Beings and Sexual Violence against Children

Recent years have made clear that people can be exploited in many ways and in many places. In prostitution, but elsewhere as well, such as the agricultural and horticultural sectors, and the catering industry. Not long ago a conviction was handed down for the exploitation of street newspaper vendors.

Human traffickers take advantage of people who are often in a weak position or they use violence to coerce others to work for them. Crimes like these demand vigorous response. Human trafficking is a complex phenomenon. We can only succeed in tackling the problem if society at large and government agencies are aware of this and together take a firm stance. A robust response has been mobilised in the past few years. However, the battle against human trafficking is never won. The effort to fight I remains our challenge for the years ahead.

17 April 2014
Child circulation in and from China: An ethnographic account on the unpredicted consequences of the introduction of the Transnational Adoptive Program
Dr. Júlia Vich Bertran, MACIMIDE postdoctoral fellow, Maastricht University

This presentation unveils the ways in which macro-level factors such as national and transnational political and economic regimes, and global cultural discourses on child protection brought by the introduction of a Transnational Adoptive Program (CTAP) transform, redescribe and reproduce traditional practices of child circulation, altering the lives of certain types of children and generating stratified unequal paths to provide children for adoption to locals and foreigners. This Chinese case is based on two uninterrupted years of fieldwork in a Chinese central province.

14 March 2014
A review of early-years childcare services aiming to explore the state of Children's Rights in the Netherlands
Olga Middendorp, alumna Institute of Education, University of London

This seminar explores how decisions about childcare are made at different levels in the Netherlands. The focus is on how this influenced and impacts family lives and especially the rights of babies of approximately three months old (when the maternity leave ends). The ongoing debate about how the care of young children should be arranged is explored in this research. From an Euro-American viewpoint a substantial body of literature in the field of development psychology is anchored in the presumption that throughout hominid evolution mothers were exclusively responsible for nurturing offspring. This viewpoint underestimates the substantial joint effort it requires to rear healthy human children. Cross-cultural studies underscore the fact that multiple carers (next to parents and family) are a common feature in many societies and that this pattern of childcare appears to work. But nowdays, the benefits of this pattern is questioned in many Western societies and institutionalized childcare services do not facilitate it.

14 February 2014
Elusive tactics: Urban youth navigating the aftermath of war in Burundi
PhD defense of Lidewyde H. Berckmoes, Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology, VU University Amsterdam

The dissertation, based on fourteen months of ethnographic fieldwork research, explores the social genesis of war and peace in Burundi. The topic is approached through a focus on everyday practices of classification and identification among youths (16-30 years) on the northern periphery of Bujumbura. It reveals the ways in which male and female youths in marginalized circumstances grapple with insecurities and uncertain prospects concerning violence and exclusion, which characterize Burundi in the aftermath of the civil war. Therewith, the study gives insight into purposive action in indeterminate contexts and illuminates the agency of ‘ordinary people’ – here, youths – in reinventing peace. Among others, it argues that some of the prevalent practices in Burundi can be termed ‘elusive tactics’. Elusive tactics refer to practices that allow people to remain or become more versatile, flexible and, quite literally, difficult to pin down. They foster the desire for or belief in openness and alternatives, beyond the knowledge and power that constrain everyday life. Yet, they also perpetuate and foster mistrustful social relations: extraordinary circumstances and betrayal remain a looming possibility.

17 January 2014
Child-focused corporate social responsibility: built-in or bolted-on? Implementing the Children’s Rights and Business Principles in Nairobi, Kenya
Lauren Schuivens, Research Master student in International Development Studies, University of Amsterdam

Many studies on children’s rights emphasise the need to see children as stakeholders. In a comprehensive approach to children’s rights studies, however, both the rights-holders and the duty-bearers should be included. Given the under-researched area of business people as dutybearers to respect and support children’s rights, UNICEF, UN Global Compact and Save the Children created the Children’s Rights and Business Principles (CRBP) initiative. Launched in March 2012, this initiative is meant to serve as inspiration and guidance for all types of businesses in their interactions with children. This research focuses on Nairobi, the capital city of Kenya, and aims at understanding how business people’s perceptions and motivations regarding child-focused Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) relate to their child-focused CSR practices and to the CRBP. Since NGOs are currently pushing businesses to implement these Principles in their policies and operations, this research also aims to explore what role NGOs can play in facilitating the implementation of child-focused CSR and the CRBP.

As well as the monthly seminars, the Anthropology of Children and Youth Network has organized the following international conferences:

The doors of perception: Viewing Anthropology through the eyes of children.
International Conference on the Anthropology of Children.
Venue: VU University Amsterdam.
Date: 30 September & 1 October 2010.
Funding: KNAW. The Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Website :www.fsw.vu.nl/en/research/research-programmes/social-and-cultural-anthropology/anthropology-of-children-working-group/conference.asp

African Children in Focus: A Paradigm Shift in Methodology and Theory?
International Conference on the Anthropology of African Children.
Hosted by the Netherlands African Studies Association, Leiden.
Dates: 18 & 19 September 2008.
Organized by Sandra Evers, Catrien Notermans, and Erik van Ommering.
Funding: NVAS, Netherlands African Studies Association.