Haunting Issues: Children, Spectrality and Culture

从许多方面来说，现在是一个孩子痛苦的时刻。儿童处于Covid-19大流行的交叉点，与家人、朋友和教育的接触受到限制；使他们流离失所的武装冲突；气候危机正威胁着他们的未来。与此同时，2021年和2022年为全球对儿童的思考带来了重要的里程碑。2022年是联合国《儿童权利公约》在英国生效20周年，2021年是“儿童未来委员会”成立的日子。因此，这个及时的项目有可能成为委员会调查结果的一部分，它出现在儿童地位明显出现在国际社会和政治议程上，并受到各种威胁和不稳定因素影响的时刻。几十年来，当代文化一直在质疑现代童年的不稳定本质，这种质疑经常表现出对失踪、流离失所或其他“幽灵”儿童的特殊焦虑——像幽灵一样，既不在又在场的孩子。近年来，这些担忧在当代文化中达到了一个特殊的高度。然而，要掌握它们对儿童理解方式的影响，不仅是文化上的，而且是社会上的，这是英国内外的一个跨学科挑战。我们建议，通过煽动一种以人文科学为导向的方法来解决争论领域，这些领域通常被认为是社会和政治科学，因此有可能看到想象力的参与，这些参与一直在塑造政策和结构（教育、临床、家庭）方面发挥着核心作用，这些政策和结构已经产生了影响，使多组儿童成为光谱主题，在公共和政治话语中只被赋予挥之不去的存在。这些鬼魂可以通过各种各样的来源被感知，包括文学、电影和民间传说，以及人文学者的需求分析，这些学者擅长绘制出儿童的文化结构与现实世界中的对等物之间的相互作用。研究网络试图解决三个关键问题，由主题引发的幽灵的孩子。第一个问题是关于处于生死边缘的孩子。第二个问题是，在英国的政治联盟显得越来越脆弱的时候，国籍概念是如何产生于某些类型的幽灵儿童的。最后，在爱尔兰母婴之家委员会报告（2021年）之后，第三份报告对国家与儿童之间存在的照料责任进行了质询，询问特定的照料模式如何可能阻碍、妥协或以其他方式允许儿童“失踪”。为了解决这些问题，该网络汇集了来自文学、电影、历史、社会学和哲学等领域的学者，调查童年状态和在想象或创造性文本中登记的幽灵状态之间的交集。这项调查将通过三个研讨会进行，每个研讨会的开幕会议将由艺术和人文学科以外的专业人士贡献。在网络的生命周期中，三种参与活动（一个与难民和寻求庇护的儿童有关的视觉艺术项目，一个电影节，以及一个与难以到达的选区的儿童有关的创意写作倡议）将与这些节点一起运行。这里提出的跨学科方法有助于更广泛地理解对儿童形象的态度转变，既作为以前存在状态的象征，也作为未来各种愿景的有问题的容器。在此过程中，该网络与更广泛的“关爱未来”主题相结合，询问哪些被广泛理解的关爱失败可能会产生这样的“困扰问题”。

The present moment is in many respects a traumatic time to be a child. Children exist at the intersection of the Covid-19 pandemic which has restricted access to family, friends and education; armed conflicts which are displacing them from their homes; and a climate emergency which is threatening their future. At the same time, the years 2021 and 2022 bring significant landmarks for global thinking on the child. 2022 marks the twentieth anniversary of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child coming into force in the UK, while 2021 saw the launch of 'Children's Commission' on 'the future of childhood'. As such, this timely project, which has the potential to feed into the commission's findings, comes at a moment when the status of the child is both evidently on the international social and political agenda and subject to a variety of threats and destabilisations. Contemporary culture has for some decades interrogated the precarious nature of modern childhood, an interrogation which frequently registers a specific anxiety about the missing, displaced or otherwise 'spectral' child - the child who is, like a ghost, simultaneously absent and present. These concerns have reached a particular pitch in contemporary culture in recent years. However, to grasp their implications for the ways in which children are understood not only culturally, but socially is an interdisciplinary challenge within and beyond the UK. We propose that by instigating a humanities-orientated approach to areas of contention which are more conventionally considered in terms of social and political science it becomes possible to see the imaginative engagements which have always played a central role in shaping the policies and structures - educational, clinical, familial - which have had the effect of rendering multiple groups of children spectral subjects granted only a haunting presence within public and political discourse. These ghosts can be sensed across a diverse range of sources, including literature, cinema, and folklore, and demand analysis by humanities scholars skilled in drawing out the interplay between cultural constructions of the child and their real-world counterparts. The research network seeks to address three key questions provoked by the motif of the spectral child. The first of these concerns the child at the boundary of life and death. The second asks how, at a time when the political union of the United Kingdom appears increasingly fragile, conceptions of nationality are generative of certain kinds of spectral children. Finally, in the wake of the Irish Mother and Baby Homes Commission report (2021), the third interrogates the responsibility for care which exists between the State and the child, asking how particular modes of care-giving might occlude, compromise or otherwise allow the child to 'go missing'. To address these questions, the network brings together scholars from the fields of literature, film, history, sociology, and philosophy, to investigate the intersection between childhood states and states of spectrality as registered in imaginative or creative texts. This investigation will take place through three workshops, each taking as their opening session a contribution from a professional outside of arts and humanities scholarship. Three strands of engagement activity (a visual arts project with refugee and asylum-seeking children, a film festival, and a creative writing initiative with children in hard-to-reach constituencies) will run alongside these nodal points in the network's lifespan. The interdisciplinary approach proposed here facilitates a broader understanding of shifting attitudes to the figure of the child, both as emblematic of a previous state of being and as a problematic receptacle for various visions of futurity. In doing so, the network engages with the wider 'Care for the Future' theme, asking what failures of care, broadly understood, might generate such 'haunting issues'.