In 1947 a new international journal was founded in Paris: the Revue internationale de filmologie, journal of the new science of filmology. Filmology investigated cinema's pervasive effects on individuals and society through scientific inquiry, mobilizing experts across the human sciences. Children gained an important place in the journal. In this article, I explore the child's role as scientific actor in this interdisciplinary research constellation of the postwar period. I examine how children's perspectives on film were elicited through observation and measurement, questionnaires, and their participation as actors in scientific films or other filmmaking roles. Studying filmology from the perspectives of history of science and history of childhood, I focus on questions of agency and activity. In filmology, activity and passivity in film experience became central research concerns, as scientists sought to understand and counter the passivity strongly associated with cinema.
Building on the premise that neither childhood nor science is universal, natural, or an essential entity, this Osiris volume examines the interrelation of these two categories from the Middle Ages to the present. The essays explore the role that science, technology, and medicine played in constructing different kinds of childhoods, how the various figures of the child shaped ideas about agency and scientific thinking and practice, and how the relationship between science and childhood influenced the formation of national identities and selfhoods, colonial rule and resistance, and ideas about progress and the future. In this introduction, we aim to spark a conversation between the history of science, the history of childhood, and childhood studies. Using childhood as an analytical category and considering children as fully fledged historical subjects allows us to rethink science through a wide range of sources and speak to broader questions relating to agency, governance, and what science owes children.
In sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England, medical writers, practitioners, and parents alike recognized "frowardness"-expressed through sounds and bodily gestures imbued with disquiet or even anger-as the teething infant's emotional language of pain. This article reconstructs the figure of the froward infant in early modern medicine and traces representations of teething infants' frowardness in contemporary medical literature, parents' life writings, and in the casebooks of the astrological physician Richard Napier. The ability of froward infants to affect a correlative disquiet in others, and of the sounds and gestures of frowardness to be interpreted as meaningful and even purposeful communications about the state of their bodies, suggests a more agentic role for the infant in premodern medicine than has previously been considered.
Since 1970 the field of developmental psychology has sought to better understand how children think, learn, and grow by comparing them to scientists. To understand the nature of science, developmental psychologists turned to Thomas Kuhn and succeeding works in the history and philosophy of science and in science studies. These fields' explanations of how scientific concepts change in communities over historical time provided psychologists with tools for explaining conceptual development in individuals from infancy onward. Following historians who questioned progressive narratives, developmental psychologists rejected notions that children were incomplete adults and even treated infants as having more capacity for science and conceptual development than adults have. In the process, developmental psychology made an egalitarian agreement that all children are scientists and cast them as ideal model systems for studying cognition in humans of all ages.
When news broke in 1961 of the hundreds of UK children who were disabled in utero by exposure to the drug thalidomide, it kicked off an international debate about the potential futures of these disabled children. The only consensus that arose was that, if they were to survive, then they must have prosthetic replacements for the limbs that thalidomide had prevented from growing. This article tells the story of the gas-powered arms that were developed in government-funded laboratories to meet this perceived need. It provides a crip-technoscience and technoableist analysis of the public rhetoric that led to the imaginings of these prosthetics, the birth of a field of medical research that could create them, and finally the reactions of the children who were made to use them.
