Society for the History of Children and Youth Podcast

47 episodes listed below

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Childhood history, argued through evidence.

The gist

Society for the History of Children and Youth Podcast is an academic interview feed centered on how childhood has been governed, imagined, protected, disciplined, and narrated. Its episodes move from Sesame Street and child labor to welfare services, colonial schooling, juvenile justice, and youth mobilization in empire.

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About Society for the History of Children and Youth Podcast

Society for the History of Children and Youth Podcast is a scholarly feed built around conversations between researchers who study childhood, youth, and related institutions historically. It is not a narrative documentary. It is closer to sitting in on a generous seminar where new books, dissertations, archives, and methods get tested in conversation. The show is calm and academic, but the subjects are often charged. Recent episodes examine how racism and colonialism moved through school subjects, how Sesame Street changed across national television cultures, how child welfare services placed children, and how former children’s home residents made sense of painful memories. Other conversations move through rural youth mobilization in Japan and its colonies, dangerous childhoods in antebellum U.S. literature, child labor and American sectionalism, and transnational histories of juvenile justice. The common thread is power. Childhood appears here as a legal category, a moral project, a site of policy, a media audience, a family problem, and a memory that may remain unsettled for decades. The best episodes are strongest in the details. A grammar lesson can carry racial hierarchy. A children’s television segment can reveal competing ideas about authority. Placement records can show how urbanization, poverty, work, and gender shaped welfare systems. Oral memory can show why writing about institutional childhood may feel both necessary and risky. The show’s style is collegial rather than dramatic. Guests are usually allowed to explain how a project began, where the sources were difficult, and what questions remain open after publication. That makes the feed especially useful for historians, childhood studies scholars, education researchers, and listeners interested in how social categories are built over time. It also works for policy-minded listeners who want a deeper historical frame for debates about schooling, child protection, juvenile justice, media, labor, and state responsibility. Its distinct value is scope: childhood is followed across classrooms, welfare offices, television studios, imperial youth programs, and family memory. The result is a serious, source-driven catalog of how societies have defined children and then acted on those definitions.

Made for: Best suited to historians, childhood studies researchers, education scholars, and policy-minded listeners interested in children, youth, and institutions. It rewards patience with academic conversation and close attention to sources.

What sets it apart: The show centers scholarly work on childhood without reducing it to nostalgia or parenting advice. Its range across welfare, schooling, media, race, empire, labor, and justice gives child and youth history unusually broad historical reach.

In their own words

Where the SHCY uploads all their interviews, commentaries, and conference audio.

Why you'd press play

Childhood stops being innocent background here, and your Sesame Street nostalgia gets a geopolitical audit.

Press play if you want

  • to see how classrooms quietly taught racial and colonial hierarchies
  • to connect rural youth mobilization with the lived mechanics of nationalism
Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →
child welfare historyhistory of schoolingracism and colonial educationchildren's mediajuvenile justicechild laborinstitutional memoryyouth and nationalism

Talks about

Best episodes of Society for the History of Children and Youth Podcast

Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.

"School of Racism" and "Citizens and Rulers of the World"Oct 31, 2023

Two scholars examine how schools taught racial and imperial worldviews through ordinary lessons and maps.

Schooling comes through as one of the places where a society teaches its sense of the world. Christine Alexander brings Catherine LaRochelle and Mashid Mayar into a focused discussion of education, childhood, racism, colonialism, and geographic imaginaries.

Sesame Street: A Transnational HistoryJul 19, 2023

Sesame Street becomes a revealing lens on education, authority, commerce, and childhood across Europe.

Sesame Street turns into a useful way to look at what happens when children's television crosses borders and starts meeting local expectations.

Når staten er far og morMay 31, 2023

A careful conversation on Danish child welfare, urban anxiety, and the archives behind state placements.

Cecilia Bjerre's discussion of Danish child welfare placements from 1905 to 1975 opens out from policy history into a wider account of city life, factory work, family pressures, and moral judgment.

Livtag med fortidenMay 24, 2023

A careful conversation about how former institutionalized children shape painful memories into narratives they can live with.

Livtag med fortiden follows Stine Granbeck-Jensen's book on former institutionalized children and their memories of life in children's homes. Speaking with Malin Arvidsson, a historian and senior lecturer at Child Studies, Linkoping University, Sweden, Granbeck-Jensen connects…

Nation-Empire: Ideology and Rural Youth Mobilization in Japan and Its ColoniesMay 17, 2023

A thoughtful scholarly conversation on how nationalism reaches rural youth and becomes part of everyday life.

Nation, Empire, Ideology, and Rural Youth Mobilization in Japan and Its Colonies follows Chelsea Sandy Sheeter's conversation with Sayaka Chetani on how rural youth in Japan and its colonies were drawn into nationalist projects.

Podcasts like Society for the History of Children and Youth Podcast

Episodes

  1. 1

    "School of Racism" and "Citizens and Rulers of the World"

    Hidden gem

    Christine Alexander, a history professor at the University of Lethbridge in Blackfoot Territory, opens a Society for the History of Children and Youth Podcast conversation with Catherine LaRochelle and Mashid Mayar about award-winning books on schooling, childhood, racism, and empire.

    Oct 31, 2023·1h 5m·4 clips
  2. 2

    Sesame Street: A Transnational History

    Hidden gem

    Helle Strandgaard Jensen's Sesame Street: A Transnational History argues that the show's global life was shaped by BBC negotiations, Italian merchandise fights, and sales agents in Britain and Paris, not just U.S.

    Jul 19, 2023·32m·2 clips
  3. 3

    Når staten er far og mor

    Hidden gem

    Society for the History of Children and Youth Podcast episode 'Når staten er far og mor' follows Cecilia Bjerre's dissertation on Danish out-of-home child placement, 1905-1975.

    May 31, 2023·39m·2 clips
  4. 4

    Livtag med fortiden

    Hidden gem

    The Society for the History of Children and Youth Podcast episode on Livtag med fortiden follows Stine Granbeck-Jensen's thesis-based book about how former institutionalized children remember their past.

    May 24, 2023·34m·2 clips
  5. 5

    Nation-Empire: Ideology and Rural Youth Mobilization in Japan and Its Colonies

    Hidden gem

    ["Shasad Podcasts pairs Chelsea Sandy Sheeter of Aoyama Gakuin University with Sayaka Chetani of the National University of Singapore to discuss Nation, Empire, Ideology, and Rural Youth Mobilization in Japan and Its Colonies.", "Chetani says the project began with a political science question about why people risk their lives for nationalism, then moved to history after she studied Chinese in Taiwan and Korean as a hobby.", "She compares Shida village in Miyagi, Beipu in Taiwan, and Quansop Village in Korea, using oral histories, the Senendan building archive, and interviews with elderly former youth-mobilization participants.", "Her argument is that Meiji Japan treated nation building and empire building as one project after 1868, but colonial subjects were not simply brainwashed and Japanese racism still limited inclusion."]

    May 17, 2023·47m·3 clips
  6. 6

    Budapest's Children

    May 10, 2023·31m
  7. 7

    Boom Kids

    May 3, 2023·42m
  8. 8

    Byzantine Childhood

    Apr 26, 2023·1h 6m
  9. 9

    Did You See Us? Reunion, Remembrance, and Reclamation at an Urban Indian Residential School

    Apr 19, 2023·51m
  10. 10

    Witnessing Girlhood

    Apr 12, 2023·18m
  11. 11

    Word Play: Experimental Poetry and Soviet Children’s Literature

    Apr 5, 2023·1h 4m
  12. 12

    Youth Culture and the Post-War British Novel

    Mar 29, 2023·40m
  13. 13

    Young Women against Apartheid

    Mar 22, 2023·40m
  14. 14

    Framed By War: Korean Children And Women At The Crossroads Of US Empire

    Mar 15, 2023·40m
  15. 15

    Beyond the Boundaries of Childhood

    Mar 8, 2023·22m
  16. 16

    Indigenous Children’s Right to Participate in Law and Policy Development

    Mar 1, 2023·52m
  17. 17

    Grease: Gender, Nostalgia, and Youth Consumption in the Blockbuster Era

    Feb 22, 2023·1h 3m
  18. 18

    Reading Transatlantic Girlhood in the Long Nineteenth Century

    Feb 15, 2023·51m
  19. 19

    Children and Youth as Subjects, Objects, Agents

    Feb 8, 2023·46m
  20. 20

    Mozart and the Mediation of Childhood

    Feb 1, 2023·38m
  21. 21

    Religion, Law, and the Medical Neglect of Children in the United States

    Jan 25, 2023·36m
  22. 22

    The Persistence of Slavery

    Jan 18, 2023·1h 10m
  23. 23

    The Maternalists

    Jan 11, 2023·1h 20m
  24. 24

    Writing Maternity

    Jan 4, 2023·1h 9m
  25. 25

    Mobilizing Japanese Youth

    Dec 14, 2022·32m
  26. 26

    From Dead Ends to Cold Warriors

    Dec 7, 2022·41m
  27. 27

    Revisiting Fictions of Integration

    Nov 30, 2022·46m
  28. 28

    The Common School Awakening

    Nov 23, 2022·51m
  29. 29

    Schooling and State Formation in Early Modern Sweden

    Nov 16, 2022·1h 3m
  30. 30

    Making the Best of It

    Nov 9, 2022·42m
  31. 31

    The Best Weapon for Peace

    Nov 2, 2022·39m
  32. 32

    Revisiting Children of the Silent Majority

    Oct 26, 2022·23m
  33. 33

    Gareth B. Matthews, The Child's Philosopher

    Oct 19, 2022·1h 28m
  34. 34

    The Moral Project of Childhood

    Oct 12, 2022·1h
  35. 35

    Jewish Childhood in Kraków: A Microhistory of the Holocaust

    Oct 5, 2022·37m
  36. 36

    Girls to the Rescue

    Sep 14, 2022·46m
  37. 37

    Plants in Children's and Young Adult Literature

    Aug 31, 2022·33m
  38. 38

    Childhood and Modernity in Cold War Mexico City

    Aug 17, 2022·45m
  39. 39

    Revisiting Ballet Class: An American History

    Aug 3, 2022·36m
  40. 40

    The Oxford Handbook of the History of Education

    Jul 13, 2022·34m
  41. 41

    Gilded Youth

    Jun 29, 2022·37m
  42. 42

    Fixing the Poor

    Jun 15, 2022·36m
  43. 43

    L.M. Montgomery and the Matter of Nature(s)

    Jun 1, 2022·36m
  44. 44

    Vicious Infants

    An academic interview discussing Laura Soderbergh's book on vicious infants and dangerous childhoods in antebellum U.S.

    May 25, 2022·47m
  45. 45

    Upon the Altar of Work

    An academic interview podcast discussing Betsy Wood's book on child labor and American sectionalism.

    May 18, 2022·39m
  46. 46

    Ages of Anxiety

    An academic interview with editors of a book on transnational juvenile justice history.

    May 11, 2022·51m
  47. 47

    The Slow Evolution of Foster Care in Australia

    An interview with authors of a book on the history of foster care in Australia.

    Apr 27, 2022·34m