Anna Mae Duane, editor. The Children's Table: Childhood Studies and the Humanities.

Abstract

Over the last decade, the interdisciplinary study of children and childhood has resulted in a rich and provocative body of research, several new professional groups and scholarly journals, and even Ph.D. degree–granting programs. The field of childhood studies has therefore emerged as a strongly multidisciplinary area of scholarship and teaching in the humanities, and yet its subject often remains vague and contested. Is it concerned with the study of “real” children (whether historical figures or present-day kids) and their lived experience, or with a social construction imagined and desired by adults? Or is it always both at the same time? Furthermore, when we study children and childhood, do we inadvertently reify essentialist notions of the child? And if childhood studies has arrived belatedly compared to gender studies, visual and cultural studies, or performance studies and remains more fragmented and heterogeneous, then what can it learn from other areas in the humanities and perhaps also from the sciences? The appearance of The Children's Table: Childhood Studies and the Humanities, edited by Anna Mae Duane, is well timed to support the scholarly momentum of the last decade, but it is also poised to call for a reassessment of the terms of the field.