Let me focus on my ongoing research here. The study of childhood is at once interdisciplinary and located at the interface of various themes- education, medicine, law, and family. In exploring the fashioning and refashioning of children and youth in a historical context, we understand the nature of power in societies along the axes of age/sex. Often, histories of children/youth are more about adults who held particular notions of childhood and the ways in which they were perpetuated in discursive sites. Locating myself in the wider field of social history, I explore the histories of education, missionaries, transnational pedagogical movements, textbooks, and children's relationship with nation-building.
These historical actors are not passive because of the lack of 'visible' presence in the archives. They exist in the way societies imagine themselves, Alongside government archives, I examine the lives of children defined by markers of social power and status in literature, photography, missionary archives, oral narratives, and popular culture. I