Professor Tracey Holland, Jonan Kiang ’21, Sofia Rao ’22, International Studies

The basis of this Ford project was the four films from Professor Tracey Holland’s class, Hello Dear Enemy, specifically For Sama, Of Fathers and Sons, The Distant Barking of Dogs, and Colors of the Mountains. The first two of these are located in Aleppo and Northwest Syria respectively during the Syrian Civil War (2011-present), while the third is located in Hnutove near the frontline of the War in Donbass (2014-present), and the fourth in Montes de Maria region of Colombia during the Colombian Conflict (1964-present). Considering the emerging scholarship on children’s rights and agencies, our goal was to evaluate the topic of children’s agency beyond the current discourse of childhood by bringing in hermeneutical methods of analysis.

We began by researching the backgrounds of the films and drafting brief summaries of them. For a good while, we did not fully close in on our topic yet, but after researching dozens of readings and journal articles, we were able to narrow down and transform the vastness of information we were facing to a solid approach and argument. We knew that children were not simply incomplete adults and rather individuals who were agentic, but we needed to demonstrate that somehow. By the end of Week Five, we each probably watched each of the films between three to four times, and we marked more than 130 timestamps within these films that demonstrated children and their lived experiences in a way that contradicted the dominant childhood identity, i.e. innocent victims, and connected it to relevant literature.

Due to the complexity of the topic of children’s rights, our sources came to include a myriad of different fields: political theory, psychology, sociology, gender studies, geography, and international politics. All these would fit into the jigsaw puzzle of what childhood meant on top of and beyond constructed innocence and victimhood.