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Juvenile Delinquency in 19th and 20th Centuries: East-West Comparisons Juvenile Delinquency in 19th and 20th Centuries: East-West Comparisons Veranstalter:
| Content Provider | Semantic Scholar |
|---|---|
| Author | Ellis, Heather |
| Copyright Year | 2011 |
| Abstract | The two-day conference, ‘Juvenile Delinquency in 19th and 20th Centuries: East-West Comparisons’, held at the Centre for British Studies in Berlin, was organised by Heather Ellis (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin) and Lily Chang (Oxford) and was generously sponsored by the Fritz Thyssen Stiftung, Cologne. The conference brought together junior and senior scholars from a wide range of institutions and disciplinary backgrounds to discuss the different ways in which juvenile delinquency has been constructed historically in the cultural fields of East and West. The central aim of the conference was to encourage dialogue amongst scholars to move beyond conceptualising the subject of juvenile delinquency from an exclusively national perspective. The majority of papers addressed individual aspects of juvenile delinquency in schools, families, courts, prisons, the world of science, and in relation to the state, but many of them also stressed the comparative and transnational elements of their findings to a broader audience. The keynote speech was delivered by BARAK KUSHNER (Cambridge). In his talk, entitled ‘Empire’s Little Helpers: Juvenile Crime and the State in East Asia, 19002000’, Kushner highlighted many of the key themes of the conference, in particular, the crucial relationship between the construction of juvenile delinquency and the processes of state formation as well as the complexities of defining concepts of youth and childhood using the terminology of ‘east’ and ‘west’. Kushner drew especial attention to the ways in which discourses of juvenile delinquency may be developed and deployed by state institutions and agencies in order to pursue political goals. This raised, he argued, crucial questions about the agency of youths and children in the construction of ‘delinquent’ behaviours in situations of political instability and war. He also argued for the ability of studies of juvenile delinquency and its relationship with state structures to shed new light on traditional topics of social and political history. He pointed in particular to the important role which children and young people have often played in determining the course of events in well-studied historical developments such as the rise of Japan to the status of an imperial power in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. The first panel of the conference examined the various ways in which juvenile delinquency has been conceptualised in different places and time periods. In her talk, KATE BRADLEY (Kent) considered the cultural construction of delinquency in post-war Britain and sought to provide a more nuanced understanding of the ways in which the concept of delinquency was developed and solutions for the problem proposed in this major period of economic, political and social transition. One of the precepts of juvenile justice reform in Britain before the Second World War, she argued, had centred upon the question of material deprivation as leading to depraved behaviour. The advent of the welfare state, however, appeared to remove this cause for misbehaviour, as increasing numbers of children and young people – indeed adults – came before the courts in the post-war period despite the existence of welfare provisions ensuring, so many at the time believed, that no child grew up any longer in conditions of extreme poverty. She demonstrated how, under these changed circumstances, explanations came to focus increasingly on the nature of the family and broader culture as causes for delinquency. The relationship between schools and delinquency was the focus of the second panel. Here, a particularly interesting paper was presented by KRISTIN WILLIAMS (Harvard) on the construction of notions of ‘delinquency’ and ‘misbehaviour’ relating to schoolboys in late eighteenthand early nineteenth-century Japan. As sources she drew on a little-studied illustrated book of poems and board games designed to teach good behaviour to Japanese school children. She argued that the poems and pictures suggest a |
| File Format | PDF HTM / HTML |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | http://hsozkult.geschichte.hu-berlin.de/index.asp?id=3610&pn=tagungsberichte&type=tagungsberichte&view=pdf |
| Language | English |
| Access Restriction | Open |
| Content Type | Text |
| Resource Type | Article |
