Application Deadline : 29 November 2023

Offer title : Post-doctoral researcher (M/W) “Knowledge on irregular childhood and youth (19th-20th centuries)” (H/F)

Contract Period : 24 months
Expected date of employment : 11 December 2023
Proportion of work : Full time
Remuneration : from 2 905,76€ to 4 081,77€
Desired level of education : Niveau 8 – (Doctorat)
Section(s) CN : Modern and contemporary worlds

The CNRS is inviting applications for a two-year post-doctoral position on the theme of “Knowledge on irregular childhood and youth (19th-20th centuries)”.

The aim of this post is to give a young researcher, who has been holding a PhD for less than three years at the time of taking up the post, significant experience of working in a research unit.

The recruited researcher will work on the construction of knowledge concerning children and young people deemed ‘irregular’ in contemporary times. The aim will be to examine the knowledge built up in expert reports on delinquent, deviant, vulnerable, dangerous, victimised, bad, innocent, vicious, debilitated, perverse, maladjusted, uneducable, temperamental and abandoned children and young people from the 1820s to the 1980s, including medical, psychiatric, psychological, criminological and sociological knowledge. Attention will need to be paid to the prosopography of the players and their networks, to the ways in which knowledge is constituted (epistemological matrices, places and institutions, media such as journals in particular), to the role of transnational organisations in the circulation and legitimisation of knowledge, and to the reflexivity of young people with regard to this knowledge, as perceived within institutional archives.
The periodisation could be refined, as could the areas chosen to study the circulation and transfer of knowledge (Europe, North and South America, including colonial contexts). The construction of categories and knowledge on irregular childhood and youth will require an approach in terms of gender, class and ‘race’. By combining these approaches, intersectional analysis should make it possible to question the gendered differences in categorisations, but also to see, in a diachronic study, the changes in a justice system and child protection marked by an over-representation of the working classes, while assessing the impact on knowledge of the so-called cultural origins of young people and their families (from Lombrosian anthropometry to Devereux’s interculturalism).

For more information, see here.