Conference at the University of Bonn/Center for Slavery and Dependency Studies (BCDSS) Oct 22nd -24th 2026
Children around the world witness brutal violence: in wars, through displacement or migration, and increasingly also through climate disasters. At the same time, children worldwide are threatened by physical violence and experience it as emotional and psychological violence (distress). Children leave behind a wide range of testimonies of their experiences of violence, which are only belatedly becoming the focus of research and children are thus becoming increasingly important as witnesses to violence. This shift in the importance attached to children as witnesses affected by extreme violence has been aided by a revaluation of children as future adults. The planned conference aims to complement this contemporary observation with a historical dimension, bringing different approaches into dialogue with one another. Understanding children as witnesses inevitably raises methodological issues. These have been far less widely addressed in historical research than in law and psychology.[1] For this reason, the conference will be fullheartedly interdisciplinary and aims at visual, material, archeological and textual archives of childhood, trauma, and violence.
[1] fundamental: Gail S. Goodman, ‘Children’s Testimony in Historical Perspective’, Journal of Social Issues, 40.2 (1984), pp. 9–31; Yuille, John C.: THE SYSTEMATIC ASSESSMENT OF CHILDREN’S TESTIMONY. In: Canadian Psychology/Psychologie Canadienne, 1988, 29:3, S. 247-263.
Contact Information
The conference is held by Claudia Jarzebowski and Birgit U. Muench, both of the UNiversity of Bonn, at the University of Bonn’s Center for Slavery and Dependency Studies.
Contact Email: claudia.jarzebowski@uni-bonn.de
URL: https://www.dependency.uni-bonn.de/en/about-us/people/principal-investigators/claudia-jarzebowski
Publishing in the Archives Profession 