Call for Proposals: Archives & Records special issue - Children and Archives
Archives and Records is the journal of the Archives and Records Association. A special issue on Children and Archives has a call for proposals.
Call for Proposals
Archives and Records Special Issue, 45-3 (October 2024)
Children and Archives
Guest editors:
Anna Sparrman, Department of Thematic Studies – Child Studies, Linköping University, Sweden: anna.sparrman@liu.se
Johanna Sjöberg, Department of Thematic Studies – Child Studies, Linköping University, Sweden: johanna.sjoberg@liu.se
Victoria Hoyle, Department of History, University of York, UK: victoria.hoyle@york.ac.uk
Invitation to submit proposals
For this special issue we invite scholars to submit articles presenting new theoretical, methodological, historiographical, or empirical insights on the subject of children and archives. Approaching children as producing and re-producing the social and cultural worlds they live in transforms the relations between children and adults. We suggest this also changes how archives need to think about, consider and approach children. How are children included in archives? What records about, as well as produced by, children are preserved? Archives have historically standardised ways of collecting, preserving, and categorising objects and records. Recent shifts towards participatory and inclusive approaches, which acknowledge systemic inequalities of power and representation in archives, have called for new practices. However, the position of children has yet to be considered in this context. Likewise, changes in notions of children and childhood in the early twenty-first century might be an indication to re-think how children and young people themselves are implicated in and can contribute to archival processes. This would underscore and trouble the political asymmetries between those who collect, preserve, and categorize (adults) and children.
‘Children’ is a very general category, as is ‘archive’. For the purpose of this special issue, we acknowledge that both categories are heterogenous. We anticipate that the relations between children and archives are dynamically constituted, which is why it becomes important to specify how the concepts are defined and how they intersect. This is a timely moment to consider these relations. Traditionally children’s and young people’s intangible and tangible sources were collected and saved by parents, grandparents, and/or schoolteachers. Some – although always a minority - of these objects or stories were given to archival institutions. What is preserved in archives is often, as pointed out by Karen Sanchez- Eppler (2013), the extraordinary. Children’s everyday lives more generally can be hard to extract. Today, children and young people are increasingly surveilled and recorded as part of larger political, social and cultural processes – in health care, education and welfare - where they disappear amongst records and metadata designed to be depersonalized and aggregated. This data may be used to make decisions about their lives which does not account for children as individuals. Seeing children as individuals means taking account of the likelihood that they today are active recordkeeping agents, making their own archives using digital technologies and social media. Taking a more participatory approach to children - involving children in which records should be preserved and collected - has become more important, as well as inviting them to give their views on what archives are to them.
We want to encourage bold and provocative ideas about the future of children and archives and invite contributions from both humanistic and social science disciplines as well as interdisciplinary fields.
Potential topics include, but are not limited to:
Children’s voices and lived experiences in the archives
Children’s use of, engagement with, and understandings of archives
Children as recordkeeping agents (including their ideas and conceptions of archives)
Material or digital archives by children
Archiving children/childhood (including legacies of archival practices)
Histories of children and archives
Intersections of childhood, race, gender, and sexuality
Critical archival studies in relation to children
Metadata and records management in relation to children and childhood
Archival ethics
Children’s rights
We invite submissions from scholars and practitioners across the disciplinary spectrum and particularly welcome a child and youth perspective, and BIPOC and queer perspectives.
Articles should be no more than 8,000 words (including footnotes and references) and written in accordance with the style guide and reference guide (Chicago endnotes and bibliography) provided by Archives and Records. For an informal discussion about publishing in the special issue, contact anna.sparrman@liu.se .
How to submit a proposal
In the first instance, please send a 500 word (maximum) proposal to: victoria.hoyle@york.ac.uk, by 20 October 2023. Proposals should contain a brief outline of the proposed article, up to five key words, a title and author affiliations. We will respond to all proposals by 3rd November 2023.
Criteria for selecting from proposals
When inviting prospective authors to submit full articles, the editors will be seeking:
A balance between articles writing on the connection of children and archives from different angles and disciplines.
A broad range of topics and methods.
Timelines
The deadline for submission of completed papers will be 31 January 2024. All submissions will be double-blind peer reviewed prior to acceptance for publication. An invitation to submit an article does not guarantee publication in the final issue. All submissions should be presented in line with the Archives and Records Instructions for Authors.
We anticipate the special issue will be published in October 2024, in both online and print formats.
References
Sánchez-Eppler, K., In the Archives of Childhood. In AM. Duane ed., The Children’s Table: Childhood and the Humanities (London 2013).