Haunting Issues: Children, Spectrality and Culture

The present moment is in many respects a traumatic time to be a child. Children exist at the intersection of the Covid-19 pandemic which has restricted access to family, friends and education; armed conflicts which are displacing them from their homes; and a climate emergency which is threatening their future. At the same time, the years 2021 and 2022 bring significant landmarks for global thinking on the child. 2022 marks the twentieth anniversary of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child coming into force in the UK, while 2021 saw the launch of 'Children's Commission' on 'the future of childhood'. As such, this timely project, which has the potential to feed into the commission's findings, comes at a moment when the status of the child is both evidently on the international social and political agenda and subject to a variety of threats and destabilisations.

Contemporary culture has for some decades interrogated the precarious nature of modern childhood, an interrogation which frequently registers a specific anxiety about the missing, displaced or otherwise 'spectral' child - the child who is, like a ghost, simultaneously absent and present. These concerns have reached a particular pitch in contemporary culture in recent years. However, to grasp their implications for the ways in which children are understood not only culturally, but socially is an interdisciplinary challenge within and beyond the UK. We propose that by instigating a humanities-orientated approach to areas of contention which are more conventionally considered in terms of social and political science it becomes possible to see the imaginative engagements which have always played a central role in shaping the policies and structures - educational, clinical, familial - which have had the effect of rendering multiple groups of children spectral subjects granted only a haunting presence within public and political discourse. These ghosts can be sensed across a diverse range of sources, including literature, cinema, and folklore, and demand analysis by humanities scholars skilled in drawing out the interplay between cultural constructions of the child and their real-world counterparts.

The research network seeks to address three key questions provoked by the motif of the spectral child. The first of these concerns the child at the boundary of life and death. The second asks how, at a time when the political union of the United Kingdom appears increasingly fragile, conceptions of nationality are generative of certain kinds of spectral children. Finally, in the wake of the Irish Mother and Baby Homes Commission report (2021), the third interrogates the responsibility for care which exists between the State and the child, asking how particular modes of care-giving might occlude, compromise or otherwise allow the child to 'go missing'. To address these questions, the network brings together scholars from the fields of literature, film, history, sociology, and philosophy, to investigate the intersection between childhood states and states of spectrality as registered in imaginative or creative texts. This investigation will take place through three workshops, each taking as their opening session a contribution from a professional outside of arts and humanities scholarship. Three strands of engagement activity (a visual arts project with refugee and asylum-seeking children, a film festival, and a creative writing initiative with children in hard-to-reach constituencies) will run alongside these nodal points in the network's lifespan. The interdisciplinary approach proposed here facilitates a broader understanding of shifting attitudes to the figure of the child, both as emblematic of a previous state of being and as a problematic receptacle for various visions of futurity. In doing so, the network engages with the wider 'Care for the Future' theme, asking what failures of care, broadly understood, might generate such 'haunting issues'.