Curating Childhood: Youth, Heritage and the Ante-Autobiography.

This paper explores some initial methodological work for a project I am working on with Dr Kylie Cardell (Flinders) and Dr Claire Lynch (Brunel, London) on the ways in which young people in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have created life narratives of childhood, and/or how life narrative archives are being made about childhood. The broader project will include surveys of children’s life narrative found in diary projects, social media, letter/activist projects, educational contexts, and heritage sites such as museums of
childhood. This paper draws on Lynch’s idea of the “ante-autobiography”—the ethics of working with texts that come before public autobiography and/or may never have been intended to be read as autobiography. I survey an initial case study: adults retrospectively speaking back to their childhood selves through media-based diary projects such as Mortified, Cringe, and My Teenage Diary. I raise some preliminary (methodological, ethical) questions about working retrospectively with child-authored diaries.