Hearing Children’s Voices: Conceptual and Methodological Challenges

Abstract

This chapter analyses changing approaches to “hearing children’s voices” within the historiography of childhood, including interdisciplinary connections with anthropology, archaeology, geography, psychology and sociology. It examines theoretical shifts, such as the challenges poststructuralism posed to concepts of “experience” and “truth,” the ways in which the resulting focus on discourse threatened to obscure any possibility of uncovering children’s voices, and the consequent resurgence of survivor narratives revealing a range of institutional abuses suffered by children. The chapter argues that the rise of age as a category of analysis has intersected with other shifts within history, including investigations of gender, memory, space, mobility, emotion, religion, colonialism and transnationalism. Finally, the chapter considers the challenges of different sources, including institutional records, interviews, artwork, diaries, letters, memoirs and objects.