Archiving Childhood: The 3rd NCRCL Conference
Friday 1 July, 2016

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 on our blog https://archivechild.wordpress.com/