Fifth Biennial Conference

Image credit: Photo by Martin Finnucane on Unsplash

Space, Place, Belonging and Identity in Intergenerational Histories of Childhood and Youth 

Please note that this conference is in-person only

 The Children’s History Society 5th Biennial Conference Call for Papers (now closed)

Space, Place, Belonging and Identity in Intergenerational Histories of Childhood and Youth 

The Diamond, The University of Sheffield, UK, 1-3 July 2026 

The fifth biennial conference of The Children’s History Society seeks to examine histories of children and young people’s experiences of space, place, belonging and identity. Children and young people live in myriad forms of entanglement. At a local, relational level there is intragenerational entanglement with peers, with family and community, and with people encountered via institutions such as school, youth and leisure groups. There are interspecies encounters too with the materiality of location, weather and climate. However, there is also entanglement at a different scale, in which children and their local cultural contexts are impacted by their interactions with national and global ideas, practices and discourses - contemporary and historical. Ansell argues that in children and young people’s lives the local and the global “interpenetrate” (2009 p. 196) and that children: 

‘Encounter near and distant places in multiple conscious and unconscious ways. While their most intense interactions may be with proximate spaces, the world they encounter is produced through diverse interactions and they constantly engage with things that connect with distant places - books, school curricula, fruit or clothes produced elsewhere’. (2009, p. 201). 

Hence it is in the ebb and flow of the material, non-dialectic and non-hierarchical social spaces of childhood that connectedness to space and place emerge, rooted in, and feeding, claims to identity and belonging. As the geographer Yi-Fan Tuan states, “space becomes place as we come to know it better and endow it with value” (1977, p. 6). The meanings attached to space are thus socially produced and contribute to the construction of identity (Sleight, 2013, Lefebvre 1974/1991). An appreciation of identity as intersectional adds more layers of complexity, allowing us to examine how structural systems built around demarcations, including social class, gender, ‘race’/ethnicity, sexuality, and disability status, impact how children and young people come to occupy or be excluded from spaces, and to construct the values they come to associate with those spaces. 

We invite panel contributions, papers and alternative forms of presentation from scholars (established and emerging, including ECRs and PGRs) working on histories of childhood and youth across ancient, medieval and modern history, and across disciplines such as archaeology, anthropology, sociology, education, museology, law, geography and visual culture. We also encourage diversity in theoretical and methodological approaches, geographical scope, chronological period, and cultural/religious/spiritual backgrounds. 

We especially encourage contributions from children and young people to showcase their work on children and young people in history. As such, we are particularly keen to hear from teachers and schools who wish to collaborate, and GLAM (galleries, libraries, archives and museums) and community organisations involved in collaborative, participatory and engagement projects with children and young people. 

The conference seeks to explore such questions as 

● How can we understand children’s situated lives across time and space? 

● How have children and young people in the past conceptualised space and place in relation to their lives, their pasts and their hopes for the future? 

● How have children and young people's concepts of self, identity and belonging been shaped by space and place in the past? 

● How have children and young people in the past been impacted by spatial dislocation in childhood, due to factors such as war, displacement and migration? 

● How have intra- and intergenerational experiences of space and place in the past contributed to children and young people’s sense of belonging and identity formation? 

● How have children and young people navigated intercultural encounters with space and place in the past? How does ‘space become place’ if you are told that you have no right to claim connection with it? 

Possible themes for papers and panels include (but are not limited to) 

● Children, young people and the production of space, place and belonging 

● Children’s depictions of place and space, community and belonging 

● Children and youth in public spaces 

● Liminality and spaces for children/children’s spaces 

● Demarcations between children’s spaces and adults’ spaces - virtual and social lines of division 

● Theoretical approaches to understanding entanglement as a feature of children’s lived experiences of space and place 

● Children and dangerous spaces 

● Children and virtual/blended spaces/places - imagination, memory, literature, games and toys, digital worlds 

● Belonging and generation 

● Displacement, migration and memory 

● Empire, mobility and children’s experience of space and place 

● Transnational childhoods and education 

● Emotional and sensory connections to space/place 

● Children and spaces of spirituality and religion 

● Children and interior spaces of the self 

● Space and place in children’s literature 

● Youth organisations and focal practices of childhood 

● Social class and encounters with space and place - from the street child, to adventure playgrounds to the boarding school child 

● Folkloristic perspectives on children and space/place 

● Posthumanist perspectives on children and entanglement with the more-than-human (Barad, 2006) 

If you have any queries, please email Dr Yinka Olusoga and Dr Julia Bishop at [email protected].