Call for Papers

The theme of the 2021 conference, Childhood and Time, is deliberately broad and designed to invite scholars to discuss timely perspectives on childhood across a broad spectrum. We hope to inspire lively debates from different disciplinary and interdisciplinary perspectives about many aspects of how childhood and time interweave. For a broader description of the theme look Theme.

The conference is organised by Tampere University, the Tampere Centre for Childhood, Youth and Family Research PERLA, and the Finnish Society for Childhood Studies.

Due to the current situation with the Covid-19, the conference will be held online as a virtual conference. Having the conference online will also help to reduce the environmental costs of attending a conference (i.e., carbon footprint associated with air travel), as well as to minimize costs and alleviate barriers hindering participation due to various travel related obstacles.

Keynote speakers: Prof. Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw, Prof. John Potter and Academy Research Fellow Kaisa Vehkalahti
Panel discussion: Prof. Erica Burman, Dr. Stephanie Olsen, Prof. Spyros Spyrou and Prof. Hanne Warming

Individual abstract submissions for workshops and poster sessions as well as proposals for self-organised symposia are welcome. Please, submit your abstract of no more than 350 words by 17th January 2021. Notifications on acceptance will be sent by 15th February 2021.

NOTE: If your abstract was accepted previously, it is still eligible for the conference. You do not have to re-submit already accepted presentations. If you want to modify your abstract, you should make a new submission. We will send an e-mail to all previous conference (2020) delegates during the week 43.

Topics include but are not limited to:

• Modern and postmodern conceptions of time and childhood
• Children and childhood over time: histories of childhood and temporal structuring of childhood across time and spaces
• Children and future, including social, economic, political and environmental problems and alternative futures
• Age, development and notions of the normal in childhood related to time and the measurement of time
• Time and temporality in children’s everyday life, including children’s experience and time, children’s conception of time, children’s time use, routines, schedules, celebrations, calendar time, children and nature times, and performativity of temporality in childhood
• Children’s time, family time, institutional time and societal time, the management of time and regulation and surveillance of children through time
• Children’s emotions, body, space, gender, class and time
• Childhood and non-Western and Indigenous conceptualizations of time, such as Sami conceptions of time and ancestry or the Australian Indigenous notion of Dreamtime
• The role of time and temporality across the life course, age and generation in the study of childhood
• The politics, governance and commodification of time in childhood
• Childhood in a digital age
• Continuities and changes in childhood over time
• Time and temporality in the rhetoric and politics of childhood
The pre-conference workshops take place in Tampere on the 9th of May 2021 and extend explorations on the theme: ‘childhood and time‘.