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Conférence d'Andy Byford

Conférence / Recherche

Le 11 avril 2017

Saint-Martin-d'Hères - Domaine universitaire

Conférence d'Andy Byford (Université de Durham, UK), Professeur invité par l'UFR Langues étrangères et l'ILCEA4 : "'Science of the Child' as a Transnational Movement: Russo-Soviet Pedology in International Context, 1880s-1930s".

In the late 19th and early 20th century, in most rapidly modernizing societies, children, from infants to adolescents, became objects of considerable scientific and professional interest. The scale of the mobilization and institutional organization of scientific research and professional work which focused on children’s physical, mental and social development reached unprecedented levels between the 1880s and the 1930s. The ‘sciences of the child’ that flourished at this point formed a veritable movement (social, professional, scientific), which became critical to the institutionalization of new domains of knowledge and occupational practice that have since become the norm in modern societies. These include developmental and educational psychology, special needs education, child psychiatry, juvenile criminology and the anthropology of childhood.

This paper will, firstly, look more closely at the transnational character of this movement and the significance that the formation of a ‘child science international’ had for the legitimation of this very new field of scientific enquiry. Secondly, the paper will focus more specifically on the positioning of the Russian child science movement in this international context, both in the late tsarist and in the early Soviet era. The paper will argue that child science was a ‘transnational movement’ not only because it was built through the international exchange of knowledge and practices, but also because it was developed as the enactment of a very particular, historically-specific, turn-of-the-20th-century, social imaginary of ‘modernity’, in which the Russian educated elites sought to participate. In the wake of WW1, however, this imaginary seemed to splinter into multiple, conflicting imaginaries of ‘modernity’. This, in turn, led to a succession of repositionings of ‘child science’ as a movement in the Soviet Union during the interwar period. It also eventually led to the collapse of the movement as such in the mid-1930s in the build-up to the next major crisis of the modern world – WW2.


La présentation sera en anglais, mais la discussion pourra se dérouler en français.

Date

Le 11 avril 2017
Complément date
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de 16h30 à 18h30
salle G 203 - bâtiment Stendhal, Université Grenoble Alpes

Localisation

Saint-Martin-d'Hères - Domaine universitaire

Complément lieu
Salle G 203 - bâtiment Stendhal, Université Grenoble Alpes

Contact

Caroline Rossi

caroline.rossi [at] univ-grenoble-alpes.fr

Info +

Lieu : 
Bâtiment Stendhal
Salle G 203
Université Grenoble Alpes

Publié le 5 juillet 2018

Mis à jour le 18 octobre 2018