BLOOMINGTON, Ill. – An idea knows no language. A thought does bend to borders or nations. Yet to share ideas, we must work to transcend such human challenges as location and language. This sharing of ideas was the aim of an international colloquium last week on the campus of Illinois Wesleyan University. A group of scholars journeyed 5,000 miles from the Russian State University for the Humanities (RGGU) in Moscow to Bloomington to work together at a colloquium titled, “Childhood and Globalization.”
“We all share a common goal, to understand and describe both our diverse history and the current realities of the childhood experience in a rapidly changing, global existence,” said Illinois Wesleyan’s Isaac Funk Professor of Russian Studies Marina Balina. “Our colloquium provided those colloquium participants and our audience participating with a unique opportunity for the immediate exchange of ideas on this important subject.”
It was Balina’s works that planted the seed for the colloquium. An academic author of books and articles on childhood in the Soviet Union, her publications are printed in English, German, Italian and Russian. It was while working in Germany that Russian scholar Professor Vitaly Bezrogov became familiar with (discovered) Balina’s book on children’s literature that was published by Routledge Press in English.
“I ‘knew her’ through her publications on life-writing genres many years before I met her,” said Bezrogov, who is studying the nuances of textbooks and readers designed for schoolchildren. “We began to actively correspond in late 2007, but did not have a chance to meet until 2009.” The two met face-to-face when Bezrogov invited Balina to an interdisciplinary conference in Moscow. It was there they decided they wanted to bring scholars to Illinois Wesleyan with the aim of exchanging ideas on childhood.