16th July 2020 10.00-4.00  68 Middle Street, Brighton

This one-day transdisciplinary symposium brings together ideas from across social science, arts and humanities to debate the ethics of the adult voice in storytelling children’s everyday lives.

Children’s stories – experienced and imagined – are told almost exclusively by adults (Bavidge 2006), yet the viability of the adult voice in telling stories of childhood has always been contentious (Richards et al. 2015). Jones (2003) argues that adult accounts of childhood are clouded by adultness and that there is an ‘unbridgeable gap’ between an adult and an adult as child. The symposium will discuss not only the opportunities to bridge the temporal space between adult and child but also the ethical dimensions of the adult voice in telling children’s stories. We welcome work engaged with but not limited to:

  • the ethics of telling and sharing children’s stories;
  • methods and practices of storytelling;
  • research projects that challenge dominant narratives about children’s experiences;
  • the geographies of storytelling including work that focuses on cross-cultural narratives;
  • children in indigenous storytelling; and
  • papers that centre children’s stories in research, including child-led projects.

We invite short presentations (10 minutes) that will inspire discussion and respond to the themes above.

Please send a 300 word abstract to Michael Cary (M.Carey@brighton.ac.uk) by the 30 April 2020, and include your name, affiliation, the title of your submission, and an outline of your contribution.

The contributions will be considered for publication in a book to be published by Intellect Books

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