This round table discussion takes the diversity of discourse and practice shaping modern knowledge about childhood as an opportunity to engage with recent historiographical approaches in the history of science. It draws attention to symmetries and references among scientific, material, literary and artistic cultures and their respective forms of knowledge. The five participating scholars come from various fields in the humanities and social sciences and allude to historiographical and methodological questions through a range of examples. Topics include the emergence of (...) children's rooms in US consumer magazines, research on the unborn in nineteenth-century sciences of development, the framing of autism in nascent child psychiatry, German literary discourses about the child's initiation into writing, and the sociopolitics of racial identity in the photographic depiction of African American infant corpses in the early twentieth century. Throughout the course of the paper, childhood emerges as a topic particularly amenable to interdisciplinary perspectives that take the history of science as part of a broader history of knowledge. (shrink)

Quand en 1856 Jenny P. d’Héricourt (1809-1875), sage-femme, féministe et philosophe, critiqua Pierre-Joseph Proudhon pour sa théorie sur l’infériorité féminine, celui-ci refusa tout discussion, invoquant son infériorité intellectuelle naturelle. Néanmoins d’Héricourt continua de publier de ferventes critiques des théories des philosophes sociaux de son époque sur l’inégalité des sexes. L’article veut d’une part éclairer la notion d’intellectuelle et les conditions nécessaires pour agir comme telle. D’autre part, il questionne les limites d’une existence intellectuelle féminine telles qu’elles se présentent non seulement (...) dans le refus des contemporains mais aussi dans l’historiographie de la pensée sociologique qui ignore la contribution d’Héricourt aux questions fondatrices du discours sociologique anticipant un concept clé d’Émile Durkheim. (shrink)