Description
The Junior Red Cross was formed in 1914 in both Australia and Canada. It grew quickly and by 1922 had been organised in 22 countries. By 1928, with a global membership of just over 10 million, the Junior Red Cross boasted greater numbers than its senior counterpart. There are rich photographic archives—most notably at the Library of Congress— documenting the work of Junior branches of the Red Cross, as well as the lives of children assisted by its programs. In many cases these images and the accounts that go along with them testify to the incredible creativity and productivity of children who contributed both materially and affectively to rapidly expanding international humanitarian networks. While these contributions were by no means always on children’s own terms, this paper explores the possibility of re-storying child-created archival materials to tell different stories about children’s experiences with, and contributions to, humanitarianism. In particular, this paper will share some of the author’s work-in-progress developing a graphic novel: Joka and the Blue Rabbit. An experiment in using a primarily visual genre to grapple with a largely visual archive, Joka and the Blue Rabbit re-stories the rise of transnational humanitarian networks during WWI through engaging with child-made objects that travel. These travelling objects in turn enable the mobility of a little boy (Joka), and his rabbit, who, alongside the children they meet, have several scores to settle.| Period | 29 Feb 2024 |
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| Held at | Centre for Creative & Cultural Research |
| Degree of Recognition | National |