In this explorative and collectively written paper, researchers and archivists from the research project Children’s cultural heritage — the visual voices of the archive ponder, wrestle with, confront, and dig deeper into what it means to preserve and include children’s own voices in archives. The authors acknowledge that child-produced cultural objects are historical landmarks and significant parts of national heritage. The article raises questions about where and how the ‘doing’ of what is here called children’s cultural heritage takes place, what it means to archive from children’s perspectives, and what aspects of children are saved during these preservation and archival management processes. To collect, preserve and provide access to heritage might empower and affirm individuals and subordinated groups of people who have not been seen or heard in the historical past, in the present, or in future pasts. Children, as a category, is one such subordinated group in heritage contexts. Adults therefore have a responsibility to empower children by strengthening their position towards other social groups, towards society and the heritage domain. This article provides insights into the challenges that heritage establishments face in taking children’s cultural heritage seriously.

This collaborative article explores child-centredness as a theoretical and methodological concept by asking what it means to centre children in research. The collaborative format offers a heterogeneity of voices on the concept as the contributing authors write, critically and creatively, from a range of different interdisciplinary research perspectives. Writing from the departure point of the key role of child-centred approaches within the field, including recent discussions concerning the need to decentre children/childhood, the goal is to spur and contribute to discussions on the possibilities and challenges of the concept, as well as new ways of approaching it.

This article takes a reflective approach to an overlooked area of ethical discussion in archival and cultural heritage studies: the ethical practice of how to relate to children’s and young people’s own donations of archival material when used in research. This is an ethics that must often balance between a children’s rights rhetoric and formal research ethics. The empirical material consists of one drawing donated to the Swedish Archive of Children’s Art and two photographs donated to a museum collection in the aftermath of the 2017 terrorist attack in Stockholm. These pictures have all, in one way or another, required ethical pauses and halts for the authors due to doubts, dilemmas, and emotional turmoil. Methodologically, the idea is to hold space for the ethical dilemmas that arise, in order to analyze how ethics is enacted in practice. Aspects such as access, copyright, anonymization, naming, and the relationship between archival metadata and research data are analyzed from and with a youth perspective. The analyzes show the intricate interplay of different norms, values, and ethics that are enacted when pictures are donated by young people to heritage institutions and then used in research.

This article explores the relationship between children’s visual and material cultures andthe official cultural heritage of terrorism. Drawings and cuddly toys have become asignificant, yet overlooked, part of ‘difficult’ heritage of impactful violent events. The focusis on two museum collections dedicated to the 2017 terrorist attack in Stockholm – theactive contributions of young people (8–25 years old) to the collections, and theirpresences constituted by artefacts. Examining both provides insights into the politics ofcultural heritage and how heritage can be produced and presented.

This article focuses on young people’s digital picture-making and the role of digital illustration applications in this process. It is based on 10 in-depth interviews with young people aged 11–20 years living in Sweden. Using the concept of visual-digital literacy, we analyse young people’s talk about how they accomplish picture-making and use different tools, techniques and devices. The analysis shows that pictures are seen as never fully finished but something that could be modified, revisited, remade and re-evaluated. While differentiating between and contrasting analogue and digital picture-making, young people often see them as complementary. They also see digital tools as generating flexibility and freedom to experiment with techniques, colours and motifs. The article contributes to understanding young people’s self-initiated leisure practices such as digital picture-making from their own perspectives.

This text is an exploration of collaborative thinking and writing through theories, methods, and experiences on the topic of the child, children, and childhood. It is a collaborative written text (with 32 authors) that sprang out of the experimental workshop Child Studies Multiple. The workshop and this text are about daring to stay with mess, “un-closure” , and uncertainty in order to investigate the (e)motions and complexities of being either a child or a researcher. The theoretical and methodological processes presented here offer an opportunity to shake the ground on which individual researchers stand by raising questions about scientific inspiration, theoretical and methodological productivity, and thinking through focusing on process, play, and collaboration. The effect of this is a questioning of the singular academic ‘I’ by exploring and showing what a plural ‘I’ can look like. It is about what the multiplicity of voice can offer research in a highly individualistic time. The article allows the reader to follow and watch the unconventional trial-and-error path of the ongoing-ness of exploring theories and methods together as a research community via methods of drama, palimpsest, and fictionary.

Syftet med den här avhandlingen är att undersöka hur kommersiella företag skapar välgörenhet för barn. I fokus står en empirisk studie av en välgörenhetskampanj från 2017 organiserad av företaget IKEA i samarbete med den ideella organisationen Rädda Barnen. IKEA anordnade en teckningstävling för barn och omvandlade teckningarna till gosedjur. Omsättningen från försäljningen av gosedjuren skänktes till Rädda Barnens projekt för trygg idrott. Kvalitativa metoder som online etnografi och intervjuer har använts för att samla in empirin. Det empiriska materialitet består av kampanjens marknadsföring både online och i butik, gosedjur och intervjuer med anställda på IKEA Foundation, IKEA och Rädda Barnen. Analyserna utgår från två teoretiska begrepp, "values" (värden) och "concerns" (problem). Studien visar att genom att koordinera värden som är viktiga och eftersträvansvärda med bekymmer, oro och problem blir det möjligt för IKEA och Rädda Barnen att presentera sitt samarbete som en gemensam välgörenhetskampanj. Koordinerandet går dels ut på att diskursivt dela upp potentiellt motstridiga värden, dels att koppla samman problem med de värden de hotar. Som ett resultat blir vissa värden av barn och välgörenhet förstärkta medan andra blir förgivettagna.

Två tvärvetenskapliga forskningsfält, Child Studies och Valuation Studies, förenas i studien. Studiens bidrag till de båda fälten skiljer sig åt. Till Child Studies är bidraget bl.a. teoretiska och metodologiska handgrepp för att studera hur olika värden av barn och barndom ”görs” i en välgörenhetskampanj. Bidraget till Valuation Studies återfinns i utvecklingen av de analytiska verktygen, bl.a. koordinering, som används i praktiken för att fånga undanglidande värden och informella värderingspraktiker.

Cultural and creative industries are preoccupied with values. Creativity, innovation, novelty, design – these recognizable buzzwords also capture what is important and valuable in and for the industries. Tensions between these different values, such as “arts” and “commerce”, have defined and identified creative industries since the term came into use (Garnham, 2005; Moeran and Strandgaard Pedersen, 2011; O’Connor, 2010). Child studies, which is the field I come from, also takes interest in the valuing and pricing of children and childhood, which often give rise to debates, controversies and moral panics (Lee, 2005; Sparrman, Sandin and Sjöberg, 2012; Zelizer, 1985/1994). This chapter makes a space for these two interests to meet and makes it possible to look into how children matter in and for creative industries. I explore a collection of Ikea soft toys where each of the toys is based on a child’s drawing. Now, Ikea is a furniture and design company and not strictly speaking a creative industry. But given that design, innovation and creativity are central for the company (Inter IKEA Systems B.V., 2017), I decided to use Ikea as an empirical case. The choice is also guided by a broad understanding of the notion of creative industries as those producing commodities and services associated with culture or entertainment (Caves, 2000). Seeing Ikea as a creative industry also allows the concept to be revisited.

The chapter belongs to a research anthology about children's and young people's leisure cultures in the Nordic countries published by the Nordic Agency for Cultural Policy Analysis. It engages with the taken-for-granted norms and ideals of children's creativity. Together with the other 14 contributions, the chapter provides researchers, practitioners and policymakers with insights into how children and young people do culture today.