Prize: Honorary award
Projects of global peace, development and humanitarian assistance have long relied on children’s participation. Yet what exactly do children contribute to these projects? This talk, presented by National Library of Australia 2022 Fellow Dr Anne McCarthy, focusses on child-authored materials and highlights the tokenistic and symbolic ways humanitarian organisations use these materials, while also seeking to tell alternative stories that attend the creativity, emotion and power of children’s contributions. Looking at children’s involvement in a range of organisations from the League of Nations Union, to the Australian Freedom for Hunger Campaign, this project observes both the incredible global mobility of child-authored materials, alongside the limitations and adult-biases of archival practices.