Childhood and Youth

In June 2014, US teenager Breanna Mitchell took a smiling selfie outside
Auschwitz and posted it on Twitter. The photograph went viral and Mitchell
was heavily criticized across international media for being inappropriate and
insensitive, presumably because she was seen to have engaged in a shallow,
self-centered act at a site of such significant historical and communal trauma.
In her defense, Mitchell explained that the photograph was a tribute to her
father: they had always wanted to visit this site together but he had passed
away before they had the chance. The “Auschwitz selfie” triggered fascinating
media commentary on the futures of young people’s self-representation as
teens like Mitchell engage with new media and explore changing cultural
norms for practicing life narrative. Arguably, Mitchell’s self-representation was
guided by the technologies of memory and experience and the community
norms around youth self-representation that surround young people like her
(see Dewey; Margalit; “Nat”). This controversy offers a neat summary of some
of the core tensions affecting the autojbiographical representations of, and by,
children and youth: the limits of self-representation, cultural participation,
experience, agency, autonomy, ethics, methods, and the role of new technologies
and media in enabling children’s autobiographical representations.