[csaa-forum] Sydney seminar: Reimagining childhood and youth

[Melissa Gregg]

University of Sydney Network for Childhood and Youth Research Seminar

Anna Hickey-Moody and Valerie Harwood: Reimagining childhood and youth

Tuesday 13th September, 3.00-5.00pm, Room 436, Building A35, Faculty of
Education & Social Work.  We hope you will join us for the presentations
followed by discussion and refreshments. RSVP to
dorothy.bottrell at sydney.edu.au

Anna Hickey-Moody: Youth arts, pedagogy and affect
In this presentation I offer an overview of my forthcoming book Youth, Arts
and Education, in which I advance a theory of arts education. When a young
person creates and displays a work of art they make a political statement,
call a public to attention and invest in particular ideas about identity,
community and belonging. More than this, youth arts communities and
representations of these communities are media that imagine different
figures of youth. These media teach diverse audiences distinctive ideas
about young people. In exploring these propositions, Youth, Arts and
Education unpacks some ways in which gender and race are constructed through
genre and traces different figures of Œmarginalized youth¹ created by small
and large scale youth arts works and popular cultural representations of
such works. In different ways across the various chapters, the book advances
the following lines of argument: Youth arts practices are both popular and
public pedagogies. That is, they are popular pedagogies, ways in which young
people enjoy learning about and producing their identity in the same way
they might learn about racial politics from a Hollywood movie. Youth arts
are public pedagogies: they make publics and teach specific ideas about
young people to these audiences. They are a means of giving social
visibility to dominant ideas of marginalized young people and, as such,
there are specific figures of such youth made and popularized by these
practices. Genre is a form of pedagogy, teaching gender and race in ways
that hold great power. Last, but by no means least, while youth arts
practices, and popular cultural representations of these practices,
generally re-produce stereotypical ideas about socially marginalized youth,
they also have the capacity to create new figures of such young people and
to re-work community sentiments surrounding youth. This work of political
transformation is precious. I call it affective pedagogy.

Valerie Harwood: Interrupting the psychopathologisation of children
In this paper I will be discussing research conducted in Scotland with my
colleague, Professor Julie Allan (University of Stirling). Our work with
child and youth health and education professionals began with questions
about poverty and the medicalisation of child behaviour. What we came to
learn surprised us: professionals were working in ways that did not always
'follow the flows' to diagnosis. Rather, they discussed the ways in which
they sought to interrupt flows. What especially caught our attention were
the ways that professionals sought to both work against prevailing pressures
to medicalise and to acknowledge the child in social and cultural context. I
will outline how this prompts a reconsideration of educational practices
that marginalise social and cultural considerations in favour of practices
that all to easily (and swiftly) psychopathologise children and young
people.

Anna Hickey-Moody is a lecturer in the Department of Gender and Cultural
Studies at the University of Sydney, where she teaches on masculinity and
youth cultures. Her research brings innovative theoretical and
methodological approaches to long standing issues of social marginalization
and disadvantage. She is co-author of Masculinity beyond the metropolis
(Palgrave 2006), co-editor of Deleuzian encounters; Studies in contemporary
social issues (Palgrave 2007), Disability Matters (Routledge 2011) and
author of Unimaginable bodies: Intellectual disability, performance and
becomings (Sense, 2009). Anna is currently working on a book contracted to
Routledge titled Youth, arts and education.

Valerie Harwood is a Senior Lecturer in Foundations of Education at the
University of Wollongong. Her research interests include the production of
knowledge on child and youth psychopathology, critical disability studies,
youth exclusion and practices of medicalization in schools. Her work is
engaged in the critical examination of child and youth psychiatric disorders
such as ADHD, depression, behaviour disorders, and the associated diagnostic
practices as they impact in education. She is collaborating on an
international comparative project (Australia, UK, New Zealand) to
investigate the influence of the obesity epidemic in schools.



Dr Melissa Gregg
Department of Gender and Cultural Studies
Quadrangle Building A14
University of Sydney NSW 2006 Australia

p + 61 2 9351 3657 | m + 61 408 599 359 | e melissa.gregg at sydney.edu.au

http://www.arts.usyd.edu.au/departs/gcs/staff/profiles/mgregg.shtml

New book: Work¹s Intimacy
http://www.politybooks.com/book.asp?ref=0745650279

Also out: The Affect Theory Reader (edited with Gregory J Seigworth)
http://www.dukeupress.edu/Catalog/ViewProduct.php?productid=17901


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