What We Learn from Children
Date & Time: Tuesday, February 7, 2023
5-6:30 pm
Location: Kilachand Hall Commons, Rm 101
91 Bay State Rd, Boston, MA
Event Description: What can young people teach us about medicine, history, literature, education, and more? What tools do we have to tune into children’s experiences and perspectives in our research across the disciplines? Each panelist will present their own research about babies, children, and/or young people, with plenty of time left for questions and open conversation.
We will also have copies of Professor Paula Austin’s book, Coming of Age in Jim Crow DC: Navigating the Politics of Everyday Life, available at this event. Learn more about this book below.
Attendance: (For Kilachand Honors College Students) You can register for this event in advance on Handshake here. At the event, a QR will be posted for you to check-in. This QR will expire so please complete the check-in form immediately. You must check-in to earn co-curricular attendance credit for this event.
Learn more about our speakers
Professor Paula Austin
Paula C. Austin is a U.S. historian with a focus on African American history, the history of race and racism, visual culture, urban, education, and women’s history, the history of social science, and the history of childhood. She is particularly interested in interiority and broadening the narrow definitions of intellectual history. Her book, Coming of Age in Jim Crow DC: Navigating the Politics of Everyday Life (NYU Press, 2019) is a social and intellectual history of poor and working class young black people in early twentieth century, racially segregated Washington, D.C.
Dr. Austin shared some of her most recent research on the Black youths of Jim Crow-era Washington, DC, in a video for CAS’s new series, The Journey: How New Ideas Are Born.
Learn more about Prof. Austin
Dr. Amy Fish
Amy (Amanda) Fish researches young people’s role in United States literature and culture. Her current project shows how child writers of color generated influential literary responses to U. S. society in the late 1960s and early 1970s, during the decline of the civil rights movement and dawn of the War on Crime. She received her Ph.D. in American Studies from Harvard University with a secondary field in Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality. She served for four years on the editorial team of Transition: The Magazine of Africa and the Diaspora, for which she guest-edited a 2016 special issue on childhood. Her work is forthcoming in The Lion and the Unicorn and in the Palgrave volume Literary Cultures and Twentieth-Century Childhoods.
Learn more about Dr. Fish
Dr. Elisabeth Yang
Dr. Yang received her Ph.D. in Childhood Studies, an MA in the History and Philosophy of Science and Medicine, an MA in Philosophy of Religion and Ethics, and a BA in Medieval and Renaissance Studies. As an interdisciplinary scholar, she draws from the history and philosophy of science and medicine, sociology, theology, childhood studies, and material culture. Her research examines the cultural, social, and philosophical constructions of “moral” babies and babyhood in American medical and scientific discourses in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Dr. Yang’s current book project, Constructing Moral Babies: The Medical, Scientific, and Pedagogical Enterprises of Infancy in Victorian America, interrogates the discourses on infancy and the notions of agency, personhood, and subjectivity as understood by philosophers, pedagogues, physicians, theologians, and scientists in America during the long nineteenth century. Working at the interface of humanities and medicine/science, Dr. Yang’s research interests include the history of pediatrics and developmental psychology, history and philosophy of childhood, moral philosophy, science and religion, critical realism, social epistemology, Catholic social thought, Jansenism, and material culture.
Learn more about Dr. Yang
Izabella Rogers, Sargent/KHC'23
Izabella Rogers is a fourth year undergraduate student in Kilachand, majoring in Human Physiology. In the summer of 2023, she will begin the Doctor of Physical Therapy program at Plymouth State University. She currently works as a nursing assistant at the Studley Home and interns at Boston Medical Center. Through her internship at the Center for Autism Research Excellence at Boston University, she is researching the experiences of middle schoolers diagnosed with autism during the post-pandemic return to in-person learning.
Coming of Age in Jim Crow DC: Navigating the Politics of Everyday Life (NYU Press, 2019)
Coming of Age in Jim Crow DC offers a complex narrative of the everyday lives of black young people in a racially, spatially, economically, and politically restricted Washington, DC, during the 1930s. In contrast to the ways in which young people have been portrayed by researchers, policy makers, law enforcement, and the media, Paula C. Austin draws on previously unstudied archival material to present black poor and working class young people as thinkers, theorists, critics, and commentators as they reckon with the boundaries imposed on them in a Jim Crow city that was also the American emblem of equality.
The narratives at the center of this book provide a different understanding of black urban life in the early twentieth century, showing that ordinary people were expert at navigating around the limitations imposed by the District of Columbia’s racially segregated politics. Coming of Age in Jim Crow DC is a fresh take on the New Negro movement, and a vital contribution to the history of race in America.
Learn More
Coming of Age in Jim Crow DC offers a complex narrative of the everyday lives of black young people in a racially, spatially, economically, and politically restricted Washington, DC, during the 1930s. In contrast to the ways in which young people have been portrayed by researchers, policy makers, law enforcement, and the media, Paula C. Austin draws on previously unstudied archival material to present black poor and working class young people as thinkers, theorists, critics, and commentators as they reckon with the boundaries imposed on them in a Jim Crow city that was also the American emblem of equality.