Future Symposia

Imagining Childhood: Children, Culture and Community

Araluen Centre, Alice Springs, 20 - 22 September 2005

Convenors: Dr Gary Robinson and Dr Ute Eickelkamp, School for Social and Policy Research, Charles Darwin University

"Children are our future", is a statement most of us would subscribe to. But it can mean very different things. It can express the heartfelt concern of parents who may set hopes they had for themselves onto their children, or who wish that change for their families and cultural communities will be realised through their children. Politicians increasingly talk about investing in human capital, and childhood has moved to the forefront of Australian domestic economic and social policy.

Scientists and scholars are asking: Why is this intense interest in children arising now? What is the idea of intervention? What are the meanings of child development and family functioning in multicultural and postcolonial society? How do these become significant for families, for the sustainability of child-centred interventions and programs, and for research?

This symposium aims to create international debate on childhood to the Northern Territory and invites the public, practitioners, policy-makers and intellectuals to engage closely with specialist scholars from the USA, UK and Australia.

Issues this symposium will present, debate and discuss in the form of key note addresses, panels, roundtables, workshop, posters, an exhibition, and film screening include:

• Society in the mind of the child and the role of the imagination in growing up
• The idea of childhood and socialisation across cultures
• Risk and resilience
• Intervention: the concept, the history, the potential and limitations
• Knowledge and the caring society
• Language, learning and literacy: changing Indigenous perspectives on knowledge and the school

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