October 23, 2020
12:00 - 1:30 pm
Revisiting Privileges of Children, Juvenile Justice and Black Childhood
Diana Carolina Garcia is an ABD Graduate Assistant in the Department of Childhood Studies at Rutgers Camden. Her research focuses on children's and youth's participation in collective memory in post-accord Colombia. By implementing ethnographic methods, she combines political theory, museum studies, memory studies, and childhood studies to shed light on children's and youth's performance of their cultural citizenship.
*This phenomenal panelist is open to discussing placement opportunities within organizations seeking talented individuals. Please contact Diana at: dcg93@scarletmail.rutgers.edu
​
Developing the Significance of Participation,
Protection, and Provisionary
Privileges for Children
​
​
​
Museums characterize children as a public in need of education (Milligan and Brayfield 2004). However, when the topic of the museum is that of collective memory, the museum elicits the co-creation of knowledge by children and youth. Drawing from my ethnographic work, I conclude that children’s and youth’s participation in the museum is seen as a necessary inconvenience by the museum staff, as well as always lacking since children, seemingly, lack knowledge and are too vulnerable to participate in the reconstruction of post-accord Colombia. Despite these assumptions, children and youth find ways to contest their roles as co-creators of the narratives around the armed conflict exercising their right to participate in the reconstruction of a national narrative. This reconstruction of collective memory between children and youth is characterized as living memory.
​
Even with the increase of social protests throughout Latin America around key societal issues such as abortion rights, corruption, or the murder of human rights defenders, children tend to be excluded from such spaces of social protest. Furthermore, it has been considered that only totalitarian regimes see children as political subjects (Dubinsky, 2012). However, I am proposing that children and youth are also exercising their right to construct collective memory under the scope of adult guidelines. As Cordero Arce (2015) explains, children do not have control over their participation, but it is modulated and modeled by adults. However, in the Museo Casa de la Memoria, children and youth find forms to question their role and participation in post-accord Colombia.
Diana Carolina Garcia
Janene Ryan
Janene is a 3rd year PhD student in the Childhood Studies Department. Her research frames adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) in urban communities, with an intensive lens on child protective service and foster care involvement, community violence and police brutality, and racial trauma in education. Along with her studies, Janene continues to work full-time for the Division of Child Protection and Permanency as an investigator of child abuse and neglect. As well, Janene hosts community workshops and seminars focused on self-esteem, entrepreneurship and parenting. Janene is the proud mother of two daughters and one grandson.
​
*This phenomenal panelist is open to discussing placement opportunities within organizations seeking talented individuals. Please contact Janene at: janene@janeneryan.com
​
Look Away, Child: A Visual Centering
of Communal Racial Trauma in Black Childhood
Black children have always been racially traumatized; it was just a matter of who bore witness to their traumas. For centuries, black children have lived in the shadows of their families and communities, witnessing racial maltreatment that only those within eye or earshot were privy to. In today’s media cycles, everyone gets to see it on full display – from children being handcuffed for selling water, to children having guns pointed at them for simply walking in predominantly white neighborhoods to witnessing their fathers shot in the back 7 times for allegedly disobeying police orders. Such racially motivated experiences raise questions around the level of racial trauma black children are suffering, how it’s being viewed by those outside of the community and in what ways it impacts the psyche of other black children. This visual presentation centers the psychological influence and unbalance communal racial trauma has on black children and how the continued visualizations of racialized trauma shape their existences.
​
Keywords: Black, Children, Visual, Communal, Trauma
​
Ecological Ruptures & Strain: Girls,
Juvenile Justice and Phone Removal
Girls in the Juvenile Justice System are routinely having their cell phones and internet access removed as a part of court orders. Inspired by Bronfenbrenner’s Ecological Systems theory, following trends in media theory, this paper will demonstrate that phone removal causes a rupture to the girls’ digital ecology which exasperates the condition of strain in which crime and victimizations occur. Findings are generated from an ethnographic study that took place in a north eastern US city. This study looked at the role that phones and social media played in the criminalization and victimization of girls involved with the courts. 42 girls took part in focus groups and a series of interviews. 22 human service professionals were also interviewed. Over 50 hours were spent observing in court related meetings. Findings will demonstrate that removing the phone misunderstands the conditions and causes of technology facilitated crime and victimization along the online/offline binary. This research shows a phone is not simply an object but rather an environment and space full of social and structural interactions. Understanding the phone as part of a broader ecology illuminates why the girls would subsequently commit more serious crimes to regain access to their digital ecology.
Michelle is in her final year of the Childhood Studies Phd programme, with an expected graduation date of May, 2021. Michelle's research focuses on how phones and social media play a role in the victimization and criminalization of young people in the Juvenile Justice system. Michelle is a qualitative researcher who incorporates digital methodologies with ethnographic and youth led methods.
*This phenomenal panelist is open to discussing placement opportunities within organizations seeking talented individuals. Please contact Michelle at: mjl355@scarletmail.rutgers.edu
