The Hidden Persuader

Artist Emma Smith with guests specialising in child development, children’s rights, and psychoanalysis.

Join artist Emma Smith for an evening of discussion with special guests from the fields of child psychotherapy and democratic education, and specialists in twentieth century feminist, psychoanalytic and social history.

Emma will introduce her exhibition, Wunderblock, and invite the panel to join her in unpacking some of the research, key themes, and ideas behind it. Areas for discussion will include the history of state interest and intervention into child development after the Second World War, the post-war emphasis on the accountability of the mother, and Emma’s interest in children and young people’s agency and ability to influence the world around them.

The event will cover the exhibition’s post-war context as well as contemporary approaches to working with children and young people. It will encourage reflection on the extent to which post-war research and debate still influences our attitudes to children and young people, mental health, teaching, and parenting.

Emma will be joined by Dr Shaul Bar-Haim from the University of Essex, Dr Helen McCarthy from the University of Cambridge, leading educator Ramin Farhangi, and child therapist and psychoanalyst, Antje Netzer-Stein.

Wunderblock is curated by Rachel Fleming-Mulford, and is commissioned by Birkbeck, University of London for the Hidden Persuaders Project, funded by the Wellcome Trust Public Engagement Fund.

Speaker biographies:

Dr Shaul Bar-Haim is a Lecturer in the Department of Sociology at the University of Essex. Shaul’s research specialisms include the intellectual history of psychoanalysis and other twentieth-century 'psy' disciplines, the history of childhood, and critical theory. His forthcoming book is The Maternalists: Psychoanalysis, Motherhood, and the British Welfare State, University of Pennsylvania Press (2020).

Ramin Farhangi is a leading educator and advocate for democratic schooling. He is the cofounder of Ecole Dynamique (2015, Paris). This is based on the Sudbury concept, where the school is run by a direct democracy in which students and staff are equal in rights. Ramin is also the cofounder of EUDEC France, a network of 38 democratic schools and 30 projects. His TEDx talks have reached nearly 400 000 views.

Dr Helen McCarthy is University Lecturer in Modern British History at the University of Cambridge and a fellow of St John's College. Her current book project explores histories of women, mothering and paid work in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and will be published as Double Lives: A History of Working Motherhood by Bloomsbury Books in 2020.

Antje Netzer-Stein is a child and adolescent psychotherapist, a child and adult psychoanalyst, and a fellow of the British psychoanalytic society. Currently she works in private practice across a range of ages and teaches at the Tavistock Clinic, the Institute of Psychoanalysis and abroad. Previously she worked for many years as a consultant child psychotherapist in the adolescent and young adult service of the Tavistock.