ARREST FOR ATTEMPTED STREET THEATRE

On the eve of the royal wedding, two anthropologists and an actor – members of a street theatre troupe known as ‘The Government of the Dead’– were arrested for conspiracy to stage a performance. We adopt a Bakhtinian perspective of carnival laughter as essential to the scientific investigation of officialdom and ceremonial power.     

‘Childhood is measured out by sounds and sights and smells,before the dark of reason grows’: children’s geographies at 12

This Keynote essay argues for a supplement to existing studies in children’s geographies, one that explores the potential of a non-child-centric children’s geography alert to the work done by the figure of ‘the child’ in all manner of worldly situations. Taking a cue from the poetry of John Betjeman, notably his 1960 Betjeman, J. 1960. Summoned by Bells. London: John Murray. [Google Scholar] Summoned by Bells, the essay considers both the intimate spaces of childhood – ones gauged by the immediacies of ‘sounds and sights and smells’ – and the challenges posed by a wider world raddled by adult preoccupations and abuses, those characterised by Betjeman as stemming from ‘the dark of reason’. The essay builds from this foundation to address the ‘darkness’ in two sets of Nazi children’s wartime geographies, as well as engaging with the complexities of Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s claims, in the horizon of WWII, about the ‘dialectic of enlightenment’. Within the latter – and also, notably, in Adorno’s later writing – the figure of ‘the child’ surfaces as one miniscule crumb of hope, of experiencing and knowing the world otherwise, set against the face of adult Enlightenment’s seemingly inevitable decay. At the close, Adorno’s own brief dalliance with imagining a small slice of children’s geographies allows the essay to arc back towards its original claims, and to a renewed sense of why childhood ‘sounds and sights and smells’ continue to matter far beyond just the domain of geographers researching children.     

Digital technologies,children and young people's relationships and self-care

Children's and young people's access to and use of digital technologies have received increasing attention in recent years. While influential UK media commentators have often focused on associated risks, researchers have taken a less exclusively problem-focused approach. Children and young people's use of, for example, social media and computer games to extend the spaces available to them in which to maintain relationships, to experiment with social identities, and to engage in an ‘economy of dignity’, however fragile, have all been highlighted. This paper builds on this work to further consider the role of such resources, accessed primarily through computers and mobile phones, as means of caring for oneself or ‘self-care’. It draws on a qualitative study which employed visual and audial methods to explore the sense of belonging (or not) of young people who have been ‘looked after’ by others than their biological parents, often in less affluent circumstances.     

Comparative Historiography: Problems and Perspectives

Just like history, historiography is usually written and analyzed within one spatio-temporal setting, traditionally that of a particular nation-state. As a consequence, historiography tends to localize explanations for historiographical developments within national contexts and to neglect international dimensions. As long as that is the case, it is impossible to assess the general and specific aspects of historiographical case studies. This forum, therefore, represents a sustained argument for comparative approaches to historiography. First, my introduction takes a recent study in Canadian historiography as a point of departure in order to illustrate the problems of non-comparative historiography. These problems point to strong arguments in favor of comparative approaches. Second, I place comparative historiography as a genre in relation to a typology that orders theories of historiography on a continuum ranging from general and philosophical to particular and empirical. Third, I put recent debates on the “fragmentation” of historiography in a comparative perspective. Worries among historians about this fragmentation—usually associated with the fragmentation of the nation and the advent of multiculturalism and/or postmodernism—are legitimate when they concern the epistemological foundations of history as a discipline. As soon as the “fragmentation” of historiography leads to—and is legitimated by—epistemological skepticism, a healthy pluralism has given way to an unhealthy relativism. As comparison puts relativism in perspective by revealing its socio-historical foundations, at the same time it creates its rational antidote. Fourth, I summarize the contributions to this forum; all deal—directly or indirectly—with the historiography of the Second World War. Jürgen Kocka's “Asymmetrical Historical Comparison: The Case of the German Sonderweg” examines the so-called “special path” of Germany's history. Daniel Levy's “The Future of the Past: Historiographical Disputes and Competing Memories in Germany and Israel” offers a comparative analysis of recent historiographical debates in Germany and Israel. Sebastian Conrad's “What Time is Japan? Problems of Comparative (Intercultural) Historiography” analyzes the conceptual linkage between Japanese historiography and specific interpretations of European history. Richard Bosworth's “Explaining ‘Auschwitz’ after the End of History: The Case of Italy” charts in a comparative perspective the changes since 1989 in Italian historiography concerning fascism. All four articles support the conclusion that next to the method of historical comparison is the politics of comparison, which is hidden in the choice of the parameters. Analyses of both method and politics are essential for an understanding of (comparative) historiography.