When Is a Child a Slave? Historians Against Slavery

Anna Mae Duane, supporter of HAS and associate professor of English and American Studies at the University of Connecticut, has organized an interdisciplinary colloquium on child labor and slavery to be held October 18, 2013. Please check out the schedule below or download a flyer to post on your campus.

When is a Child a Slave? Children’s Labor And Children’s Rights, 1760-2014

An Interdisciplinary Colloquium at the University of Connecticut, Storrs
Friday, October 18th 2013, Austin 217 11-4:30

This colloquium suggests that children are too often overlooked in discussions of slavery, coerced labor and trafficking, whether our focus is on the nineteenth century or the twenty-first. Please join us for an interdisciplinary exploration of how a focus on enslaved children might alter how we ask questions about property, autonomy, agency, and obligation as we look both to the past and to the present.

11:00-11:30 – Introduction

Anna Mae Duane, UConn, English and American Studies

11:30-1:00 – Enslaved Children in the Past: What if We Don’t Read History as a Coming of Age Story?

Sarah Winter, UConn, English. “Bonds of Law, Bonds of Care: Slave Childhood and the British Abolition of Slavery, 1760-1838.”
Micki McElya, UConn, History. “The White Slave: American Girlhood, Race, and Memory at the Turn of the Century.”
Karen Sanchez-Eppler, Amherst College, English and American Studies. “Remember, Dear, when the Yankees came through here I was only ten years old”: Memory, Historiography, and the Slave Child of the WPA Slave Narratives.”

1-1:45 – Lunch Break

A light lunch will be served for the audience and participants.

2:00-3:45 – Enslaved Children in the Present: Invisible in Plain Sight

Jessica Pliley, Texas State University, Women’s History. “Protecting the Young and the Innocent: Age, Consent, and the Enforcement of the White Slave Traffic Act.”
Audra Diptee, Carleton University, History. “The More Things Change, The More They Stay the Same?: Putting Child Slavery in West Africa in Historical Context.”
David Rosen, Fairleigh Dickinson University, Anthropology. “Slavery and the Recruitment of Child Soldiers.”
Erica Meiners, NE Illinois University, Education, Gender & Women’s Studies. “After the Pipeline: Trouble with the Child in the Carceral State.”