Timely Development: Visualizing Children’s Growth and Potential

Abstract

Children’s growth has long been measured against the axis of time. Yet anthropometric indexes such as age for height measurements do not simply mark the passage of time and associated growth but themselves indicate “norms” that stand as markers of potential. Charting changing modes of representing the problem of children’s growth over the 20th century and into the 21st, this paper attends to visual technologies that distribute potential unevenly around the world, asking what is at stake in making children’s growth and development visible, and whose potential is affirmed in the process?