The Children's Table Podcast

9 Episodes
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By: Children's Table

A podcast dedicated to how children and young people have made history, then and now.

The Great Escape: Secret Hideouts and Teen Hangouts
#6
02/01/2023

In this episode of The Children’s Table, we explore children’s hideouts. Why are we so obsessed with them? We think about how adults have romanticized the idea of kids’ hideouts in sources ranging from Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in the nineteenth century to J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan in the twentieth to rental advertisements in the twenty-first. We then look to historical sources to think through how and why children have sought out hiding spaces — including an interview with some very thoughtful young people about the role of privacy in their lives.  

Head...


Don’t Touch That! Why We’re So Uptight about Sex Ed
12/14/2022

 In this episode, we’re talking about sex education! This fraught topic reveals much more about adult anxiety than it does about what young people need to know about sexuality. We look at well over a century of cringe-y, weird, (sometimes) wonderful, and outright harmful sexual education curricula, from the 1890s to the 2020s, from hygiene books to picture books to Don’t Say Gay Bills that want to take books away, and we ask: why are we still getting so much wrong—and what’s going right? 

 

For a reading list and associated images, please visi...


It's Dangerous to Go Alone!: The Secret Worlds of Video Games, featuring Dr. Derritt Mason and Dr. Angel Matos
11/30/2022

Get your quarters ready! Dust off your Super Nintendo!  Perfect your avatar’s hairstyle! In this episode, we’re continuing our exploration of secret and hidden childhoods by talking about video games. While video games have long been at the center of adult anxieties about childhood, they also invite young people into vibrant virtual spaces. In a conversation with Professors Derritt Mason and Angel Matos we ask how these digital worlds might invite children, teens (and even adults!) to imagine new environments — or re-imagine the world around them? Together we consider how video games make new stories and new modes o...


The Tipsy Toddler Talking kids and alcohol with Dr. Elizabeth Marshall
#2
11/09/2022

 

In this episode, we talk about how adults might think they are hiding alcohol—and their own relationship to alcohol—from children, but with decidedly mixed results. Special guest Dr. Elizabeth Marshall explains that in our adult anxiety to keep things hidden from children, we wind up actually making things more dangerous, not less.  

 

Elizabeth Marshall is an associate professor at Simon Fraser University, where she teaches courses on children’s literature and popular culture. Marshall is the author of Graphic Girlhoods: Visualizing Education and Violence (Routledge, 2018) and co-author with Leigh Gilmore of Witnessin...


What’s the Word?: Children’s Secret Languages
10/26/2022

In this episode, we’re talking about children’s secret languages: linguistic spaces where young people not only protect their own private thoughts from adults but also create new categories of meanings that eventually shape the language we all use. From the secret languages twins speak solely to each other, to Pig Latin and internet slang, we celebrate the innovative (if clandestine) ways young people have devised to express themselves. For a reading list and images related to this episode, please visit https://thechildrenstablepodcast.com/ 


Hidden Childhoods and Double Ages: An Interview with Dr. Holly White and Dr. Julia Gossard
#1
10/12/2022

Welcome back to The Children’s Table! In this third season, we’re thinking about hidden childhoods, and this first episode asks us to think about how age itself is a murkier concept than we might first imagine. We interview Dr. Holly White and Dr. Julia Gossard, who ask us to think about how Americans often impose a sort of “double age” on young people that assigns different meanings to someone’s chronological age depending on their race, class, and gender. After the interview, we think aloud about how we have bent the definitions of childhood for poor children from 19th...


Topsy’s Afterlives: Dr. Brigitte Fielder on Black Girlhood, Past and Present
#6
01/05/2022

In this episode, we welcome Dr. Brigitte Fielder, whose scholarship focuses on African American literature and culture of the nineteenth century – when real life offered plenty of terrifying material, particularly for Black children. Dr. Fielder shares her research on how children are held up as sites where racial histories are constructed, revisited, and reimagined, from Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin to Misha Green’s HBO series Lovecraft Country, from minstrel shows to picture books to school curricula. 

Dr. Fielder is an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin. She is the author of Relative Races: Ge...


What Gives Kids the Creeps? Children as Keepers of Fear Folklore
#5
12/22/2021

In this episode, we will consider how children imagine themselves in relation to the invisible, the supernatural, and the spooky. Along the way, we’ll ask: how do children describe their encounters with fear, with terror, or with the supernatural? How do adults remember their childhood fears? What are some of the stories and legends young people share when it comes to the otherworldly? And what are toilet ghosts? For a reading list and related images, please visit https://thechildrenstablepodcast.com/.


Love, Return, and Resistance: Dr. Cristina Rhodes on DĂ­a de Los Muertos and Latinx Activism
#5
12/08/2021

We’re excited to welcome a guest to The Children’s Table! This episode features Dr. Cristina Rhodes, an Assistant Professor of English at Shippensburg University, PA,  where she teaches courses on culturally diverse literatures of the United States, ethnic literature, and academic writing.  Hear Dr. Rhodes talk about  the diversity of El Día de Los Muertos (and how kids’ media gets it wrong, and gets it right), the relationship between futurity for Latinx youth and bodily transformation, the compelling story of 17-year-old Latinx activist Carmelita Torres, and the irrepressible spirit of current young Latina activists – and get some reading...