Children´s cultural heritage – The visual voices of the archive

The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) states that children have a right to culture and “to participate freely in cultural life and the arts”.

However, little is known of children’s cultural heritage and their participation and representation in heritage institutions.

This project asks to what degree children have a right to their own cultural heritage - to collect, preserve and archive children’s own cultural expressions for the future?The project aims at investigating children as producers of cultural heritage. It does this through exploring and expanding the collections at the Swedish Archive of Children’s Drawings (SACD).

The project is theoretically situated in the cross-section of child studies, heritage studies and visual culture.

It will contribute both through establishing children’s cultural heritage as a field of study, and by critically discussing the issue of children’s right to culture more generally.The project is subdivided into four separate work packages (WPs), each planned to work in close collaboration with the SACD.

Each WP will have a separate mission, such as digitizing parts of the existing collection (around 10000-15000 images) and investigating its metadata.

Other WPs will expand its collection with digital and analogue images produced by children, supplemented with interviews and video recordings of the children’s visual production, which will serve both as data in the project and secondary collections at the SACD.