UOW Philosophy Seminar, Spring 2014. All are welcome!
*Speaker*: Dr. Joanne Faulkner (University of New South Wales) *Title*: Humanity’s Little Scrap Dealers”: The Child at Play in Modern Philosophy and Implications for Sexualisation Discourse *Abstract*: The child at play has been a touchstone of philosophical texts in the modern era, through which a new humanity is imagined and tested. >From John Locke’s observations of children and recollections of childhood that delineate how knowledge is formed in the mind, to Sigmund Freud’s focus on the child as the forge of the self, the child — and particular the boy child exploring the world through play — has occupied a pivotal, if heretofore relatively under-explored, role in the key texts of European thought. While to this point the observation of boys at play has been central to negotiating understandings of the human, recently girls have come under scrutiny, in ways that arguably also attempt to delve a deeper truth about the human condition. Particularly discourses on the sexualisation of girls have grown in cultural importance, to narrate the demise of innocent childhood. This paper will develop the conceptual connection between current anxiety about the sexualisation of girls, and former articulations of childhood. This will help shed new light on what is at stake for contemporary conceptions of childhood as in crisis. When: Wednesday 24 September Time: 3:30 - 5:00pm Where: Research Hub 19.2072B, building 19 There will be a student seminar from 2:00 - 2:45pm, also in the Research Hub. Best, *Dr. Michael D. Kirchhoff * Lecturer in Philosophy School of Humanities and Social Enquiry Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts University of Wollongong NSW 2522 Australia
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