We are delighted to announce the call for papers for Archiving Childhood: the 3rd NCRCL Conference which will take place on Friday 1st July 2016 at the University of Roehampton.
The conference is part of archivechild, a new a collaborative project reflecting the ongoing research of members of the National Centre for Research in Children’s Literature. The project takes diverse approaches to the idea of the archive: from building theoretical frameworks and working within Roehampton’s specialist archives and collections, to exploring notions of collecting and memorialising stories or understanding children’s literature as a repository of meaningful objects.
Call for Papers
Clothes folded in attic-boxes; play-lists of songs and albums; marbles, shells and conkers lined-up on windowsills; memories of stories and nursery rhymes; tins jammed with ticket stubs; alphabetized book-mountains under beds; postcards and photographs lining walls and staircases; shelves packed with fabric, or skeins of yarn; recipes in bulging folders; sideboards full of vinyl records; a writer’s desk and manuscripts; digital images of ancient books, catalogues, maps or illustrations; art collections in a disused telephone box; nature reserves; grand buildings crammed with objects of ancient and modern life.
The urge to collect and preserve can start in early childhood. Archives hold and preserve the past, yet they can also be virtual, future-orientated and open-source. Indeed, the very nature of archives is changing as our children grow into adulthood; in a digital world, material books may end up in digital archives, rather than sitting on children’s bookshelves.
The 3rd NCRCL conference celebrates the archive in all its forms and recognizes it as an important aspect of childhood culture. We invite scholars to explore the archive as a crucial concept in children’s literature studies, taking into account the physical spaces and practical methods, as well as the conceptual possibilities of archiving. PhD students are encouraged to submit proposals for our special graduate poster session.
Papers and posters might examine the following areas:
- Archive stories
- Songs, illustrations, and poems in the archive
- Theories and methodologies of archiving
- Objects archives, archives of ideas
- The archive, the library, the museum, the exhibition
- The archive as memory, memory as archive
- The reader as archive
- Archives in children’s literature
- Children as archivists and collectors
- Archival silences
- Archiving senses
- Collecting and collectors
- Digital archiving
- Cataloguing
- Beyond the archive
Please send an abstract (200 to 300 words) and a short biography to archivechild@roehampton.ac.uk by February 28th 2016.
You are invited to become a virtual collector and join us on Twitter #archivechild or follow us on Facebook or our blog https://archivechild.wordpress.com/
Photo: Creative Commons
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