By Dr. Sarah Anne Carter, CDMC Visiting Executive Director
Carter reflects on the work of Childhood Studies scholar Meredith A. Bak and invites everyone to attend Professor Bak’s conversation with Heather Kirkorian, Faculty Director of SoHE’s Child Development Lab…while having some optical fun.
In the moments before Dr. Meredith A. Bak visited my course “The Material Culture of Childhood,” all of my energy was focused on spinning a stiff, circular paper disk as fast as I could. I was attempting to catch a bird in a cage—watching an image of a caged bird appear as my fingers twisted and released a disk with a bird on one side and an empty cage on the other. My homemade thaumatrope may appear to be a simple optical toy, with an image on each side that may be combined—like a flipbook—to create a stable image. But, as Bak argues, it is also an object with the power to script behavior, to train—and destabilize—one’s vision, and, along with an array of other optical toys, comprised an early media culture that shaped the lives and possibilities of nineteenth-century children.
Bak is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Childhood Studies at Rutgers University-Camden. There, she researches historical and contemporary children’s media, toys, and popular conceptions about technology and play. Her recent book Playful Visions: Optical Toys and the Emergence of Children’s Media Culture explores nineteenth-century optical toys and illusions—kids’ media before screen time. Through Bak’s analysis, we learn that ideas about vision changed over the nineteenth century, as one’s ability to perceive, became inflected with new ideas about interpretation and discernment. Children learned how to see in new ways and those ways of seeing both allayed and produced new anxieties about children’s needs and vulnerabilities.
On Friday, March 12th, Bak will join us in the Center for Design and Material Culture in conversation with SoHE Associate Professor Dr. Heather Kirkorian, Laura M. Secord Chair in Early Childhood Development, Faculty Director of the Child Development Lab, and Director of the Cognitive Development and Media Lab, to discuss how early optical toys set the stage for the aspirations and anxieties we associate with children’s media today. Consider experimenting with your own optical toys prior to the workshop. While there are instructions at this link, you will need to bring your own curious and playful way of looking to your creations. We hope you will join us and join me in learning through hands-on engagement with these fascinating historical toys!
Watch past CDMC Conversations and plan for our other upcoming events.