CFP: Children in the Archives

Call for Abstracts: Special Issue of Children and Society, Children in the Archives

Submission deadline: Wednesday, 30 April 2025 

Researchers, educators and practitioners are seeking to uncover, collect and understand lived experiences of children and young people in archives. By children in the archives, we mean children as authors of material in the archive, and children as visitors to, readers of, and participants in the meaning making of archival material. This special issue seeks to combine historical and participatory research to critically engage with sources from children’s own perspectives.

This work is complex and needs to balance considerations of the archival material itself, and ways of engaging with it, including:

Issues of locating the child within historical archives, in both public (Aggleton, 2018) and private (Sparrman et al, 2023; Sparrman et al, 2024) collections;
Questions about child-authored texts, such as how childhood is constructed (Beauvais, 2019) and how representations of lived experiences depend on factors such as the author’s life stage (Joosen, 2021 and 2023) and access to narrative making (Boehmer, Davies and Kawanu, 2021);
How children are brought into contact with historical artefacts (texts, artefacts, sites), and the ways in which researchers engage with them, considering how children are defined, imagined and constructed in research (Hackett, Hall, Pahl and Kraft, 2024), what counts as participation in research and who defines it (Bodén, 2021; Collier, 2019; and Spyrou, 2014), and questions of power and agency in the research encounter (Christensen, 2004 and Spray, 2021).

This special issue of Children & Society focuses on participatory research with children and young people on historical, texts by, for and/or about children (including, but not limited to historical sites, picture books, drawings, diaries etc.); for example, how children today make sense of diaries, stories and/or drawings made by children in conflict.

We are seeking contributions from educators, practitioners, policy makers and scholars in the following, and other, related fields: children’s culture, childhood studies, childhood/children’s history, and museum studies.

Articles are invited to respond to the following concepts, but are not limited to:

exploring what literary texts by, for and/or about children tell us about historical and contemporary constructions of children and childhood;
participatory research with children and archival material;
voices that are marginalised from the archive and how they intersect with age;
how to navigate difficult topics with children;
research approaches on the topic of consent, what it means for children to participate in an archive;
the (past) child in the archive, e.g. issues around fragmentary evidence; how much mediation/editing of original text around issues such as racism is appropriate in the digitisation and dissemination of the text;
redressing child/adult power imbalances in archival research and/or how to avoid traps of essentialising the child;
concepts of generation (e.g. intergenerational, life stages), in sharing of texts, inheritance of texts (e.g. toys and other transgenerational objects).
In addition to these topics, we would also invite interviews from policymakers and/or practitioners with experience of participatory research and/or consultation of archives in their work to contribute to practice and policy seeking to advance child and family welfare and wellbeing globally.

Guest Editors:

Dr. Lucy Stone (Dublin City University, Ireland)

Dr. Elizabeth L. Nelson (University of Glasgow, United Kingdom)

Dr. Susanne Abou Ghaida (Aix-Marseille University, France)

Dr. Macarena García-González (Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Spain)

Submission Guidelines/Instructions

Please refer to the Author Guidelines to prepare your manuscript. When submitting your manuscript, please answer the question: "Is this submission for a special issue?" by selecting the special issue title from the drop-down list.

Submitting an abstract for this special issue:

Abstracts of 300-500 words, with proposed title, authors, and their affiliations should be sent to [email protected] no later than 30 April 2025;

Notification of acceptance and invitation to submit full manuscripts will be no later than 31 May 2025;

Full papers (no more than 8,000 words) should be submitted for peer review by 30 September 2025. 

For author guidelines see: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/page/journal/10990860/homepage/forauthors.html

Please note: all correspondence to the editorial team, including abstract and full paper submission, should include Children in the Archives and author surname in the subject line.