Earliest Political Memories Archive

The earliest political memory archive was created during the ERC Connectors Study through its publics creating methodologies including online crowd-sourcing, on-site submissions during three exhibition events, and responses to interview questions during ethnographic research. The archive consists of around 200 memories (most publicly available), some illustrated through collaboration with graphic designer Nat Al-Tahan. The aim of the archive was to disrupt the temporalities of both childhood and politics, and the significant collection of personal stories and memories helped researchers on the Connectors Study to explore issues such as the diversity of understandings as to what constitutes the political, the relevance of political experiences in childhood and across the life-course, as well as the role of memory, of biography and of temporality in the formation of political selves. You can browse the memories below. It should be noted that in collecting the memories contained in this archive we allowed contributors to self-define demographic information about themselves. In creating the searchable archive some of these self-definitions have been clustered into larger categories where that made sense and in order to make the archive more searchable. In other places it was not possible to cluster and as such, many of the categories below remain heterogeneous.

The memories in this archive are licenced under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International Licence. If you would like to use the deposited memories in academic (research and teaching) and other not-for-profit work you are welcome to and we ask that you acknowledge the archive and provide a link to it.

You can acknowledge the archive in any writing, presentations or other dissemination or teaching activity with the following sentence: ‘The memories analysed/presented [delete/replace as appropriate] were sourced from the ERC Connectors Study (ERC-StG-335514, awarded to Dr Sevasti-Melissa Nolas, Goldsmiths, University of London) which explored the relationship between childhood and public life. The archive can be found on the Childhood Publics website. In this paper/presentation [delete/replace as appropriate] the memories are used to….’.

It would be great if you could let us know where/when you have used this archive. We would also welcome reflective blog posts about using the archive. For an example of how the archive was used in the past and an example of the sort of posts about using the archive that we would welcome please click here.

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