title: Knowledge of childhood: materiality, text, and the history of science - an interdisciplinary round table discussion.
abstract: This round table discussion takes the diversity of discourse and practice shaping modern knowledge about childhood as an opportunity to engage with recent historiographical approaches in the history of science. It draws attention to symmetries and references among scientific, material, literary and artistic cultures and their respective forms of knowledge. The five participating scholars come from various fields in the humanities and social sciences and allude to historiographical and methodological questions through a range of examples. Topics include the emergence of children's rooms in US consumer magazines, research on the unborn in nineteenth-century sciences of development, the framing of autism in nascent child psychiatry, German literary discourses about the child's initiation into writing, and the sociopolitics of racial identity in the photographic depiction of African American infant corpses in the early twentieth century. Throughout the course of the paper, childhood emerges as a topic particularly amenable to interdisciplinary perspectives that take the history of science as part of a broader history of knowledge.
authors.affiliation: *Program in the History of Science,Princeton University,129 Dickinson Hall,Princeton,NJ 08544-1017,USA. Email:rietmann@princeton.edu.
authors.forename: Felix
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Rietmann
authors.affiliation: **Deutsches Seminar,Universität Zürich,Schönberggasse 9,CH-8001 Zurich,Switzerland. Email:mareike.schildmann@ds.uzh.ch.
authors.forename: Mareike
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Schildmann
authors.forename: Caroline
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Arni
authors.forename: Daniel Thomas
authors.initials: DT
authors.lastname: Cook
authors.forename: Davide
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Giuriato
authors.forename: Novina
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Göhlsdorf
authors.forename: Wangui
authors.initials: W
authors.lastname: Muigai