Publications and Research
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
2026
Abstract
This article argues for the importance of collecting works created by children—not just about and not just for—in formal archival collections. Framed through the ideas of legitimate knowledge and epistemic injustice, this piece combines notions important to children’s rights activists and childhood studies scholars with the role archives can play in preserving children’s knowledge through child-created materials. The authors describe how researchers struggle to find work created by children within archives, impacting the ability to create child-centered research that centers children’s views of the world as prominently as adult views of the world. Some collections that do include child-created materials are used as examples of how this kind of archival collecting can be done, and in what various formats children’s knowledge can come.
Comments
This article was originally published in Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies, available at https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/jcas/vol13/iss1/7
This work is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 License (CC BY-NC 3.0 Unported).