| Presenter | Janine Luttick Australian Catholic University |
| Paper Title | The language of silence: the case of Jairus's daughter in the gospel Mark |
| Abstract | This paper examines language in the New Testament tradition that is used to describe a twelve year old daughter, commonly referred to as Jairus’s daughter. Those who engaged with the gospel of Mark in the first century CE were immersed in an early Christian narrative concerned with families. The story of Jairus’s daughter (Mark 5:21-24, 35-43) is a case in point, plunging its ancient hearer into a story whereby they encountered an image of the family that, absorbed by loss, became a container of hope amidst suffering and death. The representation of the restored child-daughter was crucial to communicating a vision of future bonds and fruitfulness within a household that was conceivably reconfigured with Jesus as the authoritative father-figure. Neither the daughter in the story, nor any child in the narrative of Mark’s gospel (except Herodias’s daughter who requests the beheading of John the Baptist), however, has a voice in the narrative of the gospel. This paper probes the representations of silence in Mark 5:21-24, 35-43, of both the female child and adults in the story. It shows how a child’s life could be associated with liminality and with access to divine power. At the same time, it reveals aspects of the New Testament tradition that contained a bias against children’s voice. |
| Biography | Dr Janine Luttick is a senior lecturer in biblical studies at Australian Catholic University. Her current research focuses on the depictions of children and childhood in the Bible, connecting her study with scholarship on the history of emotions, literary trauma theory and on family studies in the New Testament. Janine has published in the areas of the gospel of Mark and contemporary biblical hermeneutics. Her most recent publication is the monograph, Jairus's Daughter and the Female Body in Mark. |
| Presenter | Benjamin Liberatore Columbia University, USA |
| Paper Title | ‘They only interview the chiefs!’: Child choristers’ accounts of voice and voicelessness in English cathedral music |
| Abstract | For centuries, children’s voices have been among the foremost ‘instruments’ in the music and liturgy of the Church of England. In the sounds and symbolics of the nation’s established church, the ‘pure,’ ‘unbroken’ voices of school-aged boys—and recently, if grudgingly, girls—help imagine both the ‘world without end’ of Christian promise and the earthly survival of a ‘quintessentially English’ cultural form. This paper examines the role of child choristers—both as cultural ‘figurations’ (Castañeda 2002) and as the human beings who, always imperfectly and often uncomfortably, ‘must live inside’ (Stockton 2009) those figurations—in the maintenance and transmission of culture, heritage, and identity. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, interviews with 165 current and former choristers, and a corpus of choristers’ stories, poetry, and score marginalia, I illustrate both the ideological investments into which adult institutions conscript children’s voices/bodies and the perspectives of young choristers themselves. Deliberately centering the words of children whose voices, often, are tolerated only insofar as they are singing and are otherwise silenced as—as 12-year-old George put it—the ‘silly’ or ‘ignorant’ babble of ‘low-down workers,’ I suggest that choristers, far from ignorant of the ideological labour they perform, are amongst its sharpest critics: from their interview testimonies to the doodles in their scores, choristers reveal rich, sometimes subversive archives of creativity, questioning, and meaning-making coeval with but (literally) in the margins of adult intent. What gendered, racialised, and classed imaginaries are reproduced by invocations of choristers’ voices as uniquely ‘pure’ and therefore uniquely suited to Anglican worship? How do choristers understand, internalise, or resist the representational burdens placed upon them? And what might we learn, from children whose job it is to perform not just music, but childhood itself, about both ‘actual’ children and the child-as-figure in/as projects of national identity? |
| Biography | Benjamin Liberatore is an Anthropology PhD candidate at Columbia University. His research examines the ritual, aesthetic, and representational work of English cathedrals’ child choristers. Beginning with the singing voice as a thing that both ‘breaks’ and makes the body in aged and gendered ways and continuing through widespread anxieties regarding cultural loss and the ‘destruction’ of ‘tradition,’ he considers how children generally and choristers particularly are imagined in—and help imagine—narratives of heritage, history, futurity, and change. Ben’s research centers children’s own perspectives, examining how choristers accept, modify, resist, and reject the adult discourses into which they are conscripted. |
| Presenter | Sarai Jaramillo Egaña Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile |
| Paper Title | From “Huachos” to Children: An Analysis of the Social Representations of Chilean Childhood in Its Main Legislative Developments (1912–2021) Keywords: Huachismo, Chilean childhood, Laws |
| Abstract | Analysing the social construction of childhood may require observing the historical timeline and the dialectics of normative instruments. These instruments serve as historical milestones, genuine bridges connecting the past, present, and future, allowing for the evolution of social representations of childhood. Delving into the history of childhood in Chile, various historians and social researchers concur in recognising the formation of a social category of childhood that progresses in tandem with the process of national identity construction. This process dates back to the colonial era and includes elements that came to the fore in the nineteenth century, where racial mixing (mestizaje) and changes in family structure—particularly in paternal roles—gradually gave rise to one of the most striking and profound phenomena in Chile’s national identity: huachismo (Milanich, 2009; Montecinos, 2010; Salazar, 2006; Rojas, 2010). The State, in its historical role as a key architect of Chilean society, has employed its normative tools to participate in constructing and deconstructing aspects of childhood reality under huachismo. This term highlights the fragility of social and family bonds and the resultant social stigma, rooted in their breakdown, which was prevalent in the late eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries. Despite extensive legal reforms, the social imaginary regarding the status of children in situations of abandonment still lingers—manifested in institutions serving vulnerable children and in various social representations. A sociological perspective facilitates uncovering the historical-social evolution of huachismo and how it operates within the dialectics of the main legislative developments concerning childhood between 1912 and 2019. This study examined eight legislative instruments relating to childhood, followed by a content analysis framed by the constructivist perspective of the sociology of childhood. The procedure involved decoding each text and then assigning the analytical category “Social Representations,” grouping the terms that reflect the social image of Chilean childhood. |
| Biography | I hold a Public Administration degree from the University of Santiago, Chile. I earned a Master’s in Social Policy for Children and Adolescents from the Complutense University of Madrid, and I am currently a candidate for a Master’s in Public Policy at the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile. I have worked on research related to childhood, juvenile justice, public policy, and have experience in public institutions such as the Ministry of the Interior and Public Security. My main interest lies in studying the historical context of childhood policies, the role of the State, and how to develop improvements in the present. |
| Presenter | Elaine Williams, Ella Simpson and Maria Arche University of Greenwich, UK |
| Paper Title | Reframing Youth Justice; Child-centred language and its impact on youth justice |
| Abstract | Institutional language within youth justice policy and practice has changed significantly over previous decades. In recent years we have seen a shift away from terminology and phrases that are seen to pathologise children and young people or reinforce deficit models of interpreting behaviours. Instead, academics, policy makers and practitioners have promoted the use of ‘child friendly’ language in youth justice, adjusting terminology to centre the child first, and the offence second. Within this paradigm shift, the influence of language on perception of childhood is emphasised, pushing against the routine adultification of children in conflict with the law. This paper interrogates the power of language and its ability to shape legal and youth justice practice. We consider the impact of the ‘er’ suffix in terms such as “young offender”, that transform the temporal act of an offence into the fixed identity of an ‘offender’. This paper also considers how language, as a fundamental building block of narrative, might serve to empower children and young people to take possession of their own stories; to shape, perhaps even create new future trajectories for themselves. Combining creative practice with a social constructionist understanding of narrative in this way demands the recognition of voices of lived experience as a valuable contribution to academic and policy conversations moving forward. Contextualising these developments within the broader policy landscape of youth justice, this paper emphasises the powerful influence of language and discourse on paradigm shifts across this sector. |
| Biography 1 | Dr Elaine Williams is a Lecturer in Criminology at the University of Greenwich. She specialises in the politics of knife crime with extensive experience in youth work practice and crime prevention in southeast London. Her research focuses on the policing and criminalisation of young people, with particular interest in the interaction between neoliberal social policy and popular discourse. Elaine’s work seeks to apply theoretical frameworks in practical ways and she actively collaborates with charities and organisations in south London to bring about policy reform and advise on violence reduction strategies. |
| Biography 2 | Dr Ella Simpson joined the University of Greenwich as a Senior Lecturer in Criminology in 2022 and teaches across undergraduate and postgraduate programmes. They lead or co-lead modules on criminological theories (Foundations of Criminology), penological theory and policy (Penology; Prison Histories: Past and Present) and criminal justice policy and practice (Professional Practice in Criminal Justice), a module that introduces students to the realities of a career in the criminal justice system supported by Ella’s own experience as a prison practitioner. Ella is the Early Career Research Lead for the Centre for Communities and Social Justice and is currently engaged in a number of research projects that explore various aspects of people’s lived experience of prison and life after release. Ella’s research specialisms include narrative, historical and cultural criminology, along with expertise in the theory and practice of creative arts interventions in criminal justice settings. Before joining Greenwich, Ella taught at the University of Winchester and previously at Bath Spa University, from where they also gained their PhD. Before returning to academia in 2013, Ella worked as a creative arts facilitator in prisons for over a decade and has collaborated on a number of successful creative projects and writing anthologies with people in prison. |
| Biography 3 | Professor María J. Arche obtained a PhD in Theoretical Linguistics & Language Acquisition under the supervision of Tim Stowell (University California Los Angeles) and Violeta Demonte (Autonomous University of Madrid). She later on held an ESRC postdoctoral position at the University of Southampton and visiting scholarships at the Universities of Massachusetts Amherst, Groningen and Tromsø. María does research in the (morpho)syntax-semantics interface, to understand the correspondences between forms and meaning in language. She studies the elements languages have to convey information about time (tense and aspect) across categories (verbs, but also nouns and adjectives). Maria has investigated these topics in the grammar of Spanish and also their acquisition and crosslinguistic variation, publishing works that capture empirical data from large sets of languages and detailed theoretical analyses. Since 2018 she has created initiatives to increase the understanding of language difficulties across populations. Outcomes of this work include the ATLAS Manifesto Think Language First, launched at the House of Lords in January 2024 in partnership with the Royal College of Speech and Language Therapy. María Arche is the Chair of the transnational EU COST Action Justice to Youth Language Needs, which comprises linguists, speech and language therapists as well as legal, health and youth justice professionals from over 30 countries. The platform is set to address the compromised access to justice of (young) people because of their un-identified language needs, create effective language assessments and improve awareness across services. |