Unfolding Research is a recurring series in which people answer questions about their experiences conducting research in the Manuscript Division. Kelsey Henry is the Cotsen Postdoctoral Fellow in Race and Ethnicity Studies in the Society of Fellows at Princeton University, and a former research fellow with the Consortium for History of Science, Technology and Medicine (CHSTM). She is an interdisciplinary historian whose work integrates perspectives from Black studies, histories of science and medicine, and disability studies.
Could you tell us about your dissertation?
Sure! My dissertation, “Racing the Life Course: Antiblack Epistemes and Ethical Foreclosures in U.S. Child Development Science, 1830s–1960s,” is a history of “developmental disability” as a racial category. I interrogate how the persistent, and often unquestioned, pairing of whiteness and developmental normality and blackness and developmental abnormality has estranged Black children from normative age markers, whether they are clinically diagnosed with developmental disability or not. To do this, I study the legacies of nineteenth-century scientific metrics of human development and racial difference – specifically theories of Black developmental incapacity that were used to justify chattel slavery – in twentieth-century developmental psychology, child psychiatry, and pediatric science.
I argue that despite the ascendance of “universal” developmental standards in child development science, these metrics were normed around white children and subsequently (mis)diagnosed Black developmental delays and misunderstood antiblack racism’s developmental impact on Black children. Ultimately, I contend that child development science has supplied an understudied evidentiary source for withholding human recognition and legal personhood, of which the capacity for “mature” adulthood is a prerequisite, from Black Americans. Despite this, the project concludes with the complex motivations of Black child development scientists who wanted to reform the field to further racially liberatory aims.
What collections did you explore while you were at the Library of Congress? What did you find that surprised you, or pushed your research in a different direction?
I worked with Kenneth B. Clark’s and Arnold Gesell’s collections. Both men were twentieth-century developmental psychologists, and Clark was one of the first credentialed Black developmental psychologists in the US. They are largely representative of different eras in child development science, with Gesell falling on the hereditarian side of the “nature v. nurture” debate from the 1920s to the 1940s, and Clark embodying the mid-century environmentalist departure that situated children more fully within their social climates between the 1950s and 1960s.
I decided to visit the Clark and Gesell collections because I was curious about the “emotional” turn in mid-century developmental psychology, when researchers became increasingly interested in what I call “development’s intangibles” – emotion and personality. I knew that both men studied children’s emotions, but in very different ways. While working with their collections, I realized how unrepresentative Clark’s work was of the family-centered model of emotional development that was most popular in mid-century developmental psychology. Gesell helped popularize this family-centered model, in which a child’s emotional health was chiefly determined by family dynamics.
In Gesell’s collection, I found research reports and memoranda from studies conducted with children that were trying to isolate the “emotional components” of each age. Although Gesell was a hereditarian at heart, he also interrogated how the familial environment irrevocably shaped a child’s emotional development, and their vulnerability to emotional disorder. In doing so, he preempted a trend that would become more pronounced with the ascent of Freudianism in mid-century developmental psychology.
Clark was more concerned with how social pathologies that permeated and transcended “the home,” like racial prejudice, were somaticized and expressed developmentally. Clark’s collection included drafts of his lecture for the Mid-Century White House Conference on Children and Youth, titled “The Effect of Discrimination and Prejudice on Healthy Personality Development.” His notes were integral to my dissertation’s analysis of Clark as a paradigm-shifter who challenged the conceptual orthodoxies of his field to account for developmental variables – like antiblack racism – that scaled beyond the family.
What is the CHSTM Research Fellows program, and how would you describe your experience as a fellow?
The Consortium for the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine (CHSTM) Research Fellows Program funds scholars who are interested in working with collections at Consortium member institutions to advance their research. I received a CHSTM Research Fellowship in the fifth year of my PhD and it was invaluable. Most of the archives referenced in my dissertation, including collections at the Library of Congress, American Philosophical Society, and the Rockefeller Archive Center (among others), were CHSTM members. During my term as a Fellow, I also attended workshops with other Fellows and CHSTM affiliates, which provided a wonderful opportunity to build community with other thinkers in the history of science and medicine.
Were there archival sources you were hoping to find, but that no institution seemed to have collected? Are there ways archives can better support projects like yours?
For the most part, I got lucky; there were no archival sources that I wanted to find that I couldn’t track down for this iteration of my project. However, this is largely because at the dissertation stage, my project has focused primarily on the records of scientists and clinicians and not on the firsthand perspectives of Black children. As I revise my dissertation into a book, I want to integrate the voices of Black parents and children as developmental knowledge producers themselves. Child studies scholars have written extensively about the difficulties of locating children “in their own words” in archives mediated and maintained by adults. To better support projects in childhood studies, I am eager to think alongside archivists about creative methods for building children’s archives in the present. While these legacy efforts would be less helpful to my own project, I am invested in public history work that asks how we can build the archives we wish existed already, so that someday-historians – and all curious folk – might be able to access children’s archives in the future.
What are your research strategies? What advice would you give to graduate students and early career scholars who are just beginning to work in archives?
Talk to archivists, reference librarians, and subject specialists! When I first started going to archives, I think I misunderstood the labor of archival research as being exclusively about whatever was inside the boxes and folders I requested. I am so thankful for specialists like Josh Levy of the Manuscript Division, who broke the ice and asked me questions – and follow-up questions – about my research. These conversations often led me to collections I would not have looked at otherwise and helped me navigate the collections I requested with more discernment. Also, don’t just take pictures! I realize that sometimes this cannot be helped and that limited funds and time make “slow” archival navigation difficult. But when I can, I try to set aside a couple of days to move slowly through a collection in real time. Slowing my pace when interacting with collections often generates questions that I can then talk about with archivists and reference librarians in person.
What are you working on now?
I am working on a couple of article-length projects in addition to revising and expanding my dissertation into a book manuscript. One article focuses on the Black Caucus of the Society for Research in Child Development and its therapeutic and policy-level efforts to support families affected by the Atlanta Child Murders in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The other article looks at efforts to standardize “examiner affect” and control children’s emotions to streamline data collection in early twentieth-century child anthropometry (the comparative study of various human body measurements). This article contributes to scholarship on scientific effects and emotional management in human subject research. I would also love to write a popular article for Ebony or Parents magazine that introduces my research to a general audience.
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