In Situ. Au regard des sciences sociales 3 | 2022 Enfants et patrimoines Discovering Child Curating A conversation with Monica Eileen Patterson by Sarah Gensburger, on July 5, 2021 Monica Eileen Patterson and Sarah Gensburger Electronic version URL: https://journals.openedition.org/insituarss/1582 ISSN: 2680-4972 Translation(s): À la rencontre de la muséologie par les enfants - URL : https://journals.openedition.org/insituarss/ 1513 [fr] Publisher Ministère de la Culture Electronic reference Monica Eileen Patterson and Sarah Gensburger, “Discovering Child Curating”, In Situ. Au regard des sciences sociales [Online], 3 | 2022, Online since , connection on 16 December 2022. URL: http:// journals.openedition.org/insituarss/1582 This text was automatically generated on 16 December 2022. Creative Commons - Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International - CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ Discovering Child Curating Discovering Child Curating A conversation with Monica Eileen Patterson by Sarah Gensburger, on July 5, 2021 Monica Eileen Patterson and Sarah Gensburger 1 Dr. Monica Eileen Patterson is Associate Professor and Assistant Director of Curatorial Studies in the Institute for the Comparative Study of Literature, Art and Culture at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. She holds a PhD in Anthropology and History, and a certificate in Museum Studies from the University of Michigan. Patterson is author of several articles and co-editor of two books: Curating Difficult Knowledge: Violent Pasts in Public Places (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011) and Anthrohistory: Unsettling Knowledge and Questioning Discipline (University of Michigan Press, 2011). Currently, she is completing a manuscript that examines the multiple and contested understandings of childhood in late-apartheid South Africa. 2 Her latest project, “A New, Critical Children’s Museology” identifies and develops approaches to producing exhibit content not just for or about children, but by and with children across the globe. It explores how children can change curatorial practice and their communities via active participation and exhibit co-creation. As a curator, scholar, and activist, Patterson is particularly interested in the intersections of memory and violence in postcolonial Africa and Canada, and the ways in which they are represented and engaged in contemporary public spheres. Sarah Gensburger [SG] – You are an Associate Professor in the Institute for the Comparative Study of Literature, Art and Culture and the Assistant Director of Curatorial Studies at Carleton University in Canada and one of your fields of expertise is the relationship between children and heritage. Could you tell us a little bit more how you came to this topic of research? Monica Eileen Patterson [MEP] – I grew up in a household where my ideas were always valued. My parents were both educators, and my mom in particular, as a former Montessori school teacher, put a great deal of time and energy into creating opportunities for my sister and me to explore the world and to reflect and record our perspectives on it. She was always deeply interested in what we had to say, and treasured the artwork, stories, performances, and songs we created. From the time I could talk (and perhaps before!) I had strong opinions and my dad engaged me in In Situ. Au regard des sciences sociales, 3 | 2022 1 Discovering Child Curating debate, breaking into a smile when I would “win” the argument or present an idea that hadn’t occurred to him. Having my ideas and opinions valued and respected was for me, the ultimate unconditional love, and taught me that children’s ideas are important– a truth that later years of formal education would often ignore. But my research and role as a mother have brought me back to this core principle which was modelled in my family from my earliest days. One of the most formative periods of my intellectual and personal development occurred during the third year of my undergraduate studies at Swarthmore College (Pennsylvania), when I was enrolled in a study abroad program in Zimbabwe in the late ‘90s. As students, we lived with different Zimbabwean families in a rural village, township, and low-density suburb to better understand life in these varied settings, while being immersed in local culture. I spent a lot of my year in the rural village of Chiweshe, which had been a contested site during the war for independence (1964-1979) and, in the colonial government’s parlance, a “protected village.” This was a term used to justify the violent uprooting of villagers into a central, fenced in area where they could be contained and watched by armed guards in order to try to sever the support networks and lines of communication between villagers and freedom fighters (which the regime referred to as “terrorists” or “guerrillas”). In Chiweshe, I found that history was all around me, literally etched into the landscape where hundreds of trees had been cleared to create the open space and fencing around the “protected village”, or what villagers called “the keep” to reflect their feeling of being rounded up and surveilled like livestock. The trauma of violent struggle for liberation was a heavy presence in the lives of people who had lost so much, and I wanted to learn more about this period. One of the things that quickly became apparent was how consequential childhood experiences often were in people’s lives. When I conducted oral histories with people about their past, the overwhelming impetus for many of the most important decisions they made (such as going into exile to join the armed struggle), were rooted in experiences they had as children. But while I was seeing how significantly childhood experiences impacted the unfolding of historical events such as revolution, for the most part this was not reflected in the scholarly literature I was reading about Zimbabwean history, which focused mainly on the actions and experiences of adults. My time in Zimbabwe taught me many things– about the deep knowledge held by everyday people that does not always make it into books, the impact of the past on the present, and the importance of children and childhood in all societies. When I went on to pursue my PhD in anthropology and history, I decided to shift my research site to South Africa, where a national Truth and Reconciliation Commission had been engaged with investigations and public hearings about some of the human rights violations that took place under apartheid rule (1948-1994). There again, I was most compelled by the experiences and perspectives that were not centred in dominant narratives and official processes. For instance, in focusing on a narrow definition of “gross violations of human rights,” the TRC failed to capture the kinds of every-day oppression that was at the heart of the apartheid system of racial segregation and white supremacy. It also privileged the experiences of men, and focused far less on women and children, although it is important to note that the commissioners recognized this shortcoming and sought to address it in a variety of ways, including by holding a Special Hearing on Women and one on Children and In Situ. Au regard des sciences sociales, 3 | 2022 2 Discovering Child Curating Youth. So part of what I sought to do in my doctoral research was to better understand the contested concept of “childhood” and the contradictory meanings that various historical actors imbued it with. Through archival research; visual analysis of struggle materials such as political posters and an amazing trilingual magazine featuring children’s drawings, poems, and letters; interviews with adults about their childhoods; and analysis of how these histories were and were not being commemorated and remembered in public history projects like the TRC, museums, and memorials, I investigated how competing constructions of the social category of the child played out in the tumultuous late apartheid period and into the early years of democratic rule. All of these experiences have converged now in a commitment to facilitating the inclusion of children’s knowledge, perspectives, and cultural production in the public historical and scholarly record utilizing child-centred approaches that share power and authority with children themselves. This means creating opportunities for children to represent and speak for themselves, and drawing from the cache of museological technologies, for instance, curating exhibitions to help elevate and engage with children’s knowledge more rigorously. SG – Your current research project funded by the SSHRC is entitled “A New, Critical Children’s Museology”. Could you tell us more about it? MEP – As I define it, a new, critical children’s museology refers to the production of museum content and programming not just for or about children, but also by and with children in ways that engage them as valued social actors and knowledge-bearers. Drawing from recent interventions in the fields of Childhood Studies, Curatorial Studies, and Museum Studies I ask: How would museology– the study and practice of museum work– change if children were to be included not just as a topic of display or as target audience members, but as active participants and co-creators of museum content and programming? Addressing this question will fill a gap in our knowledge by helping forge a new field I call “Critical Children’s Museology”. This work is “critical” in at least two ways: first, ceding power to children in museological institutions creates an opening for much-needed critique of the adultdominated status quo and traditional, exclusive frameworks that perdure in order to make room for new perspectives, creative innovations, and more dialogic, participatory engagements with broader publics. Second, a new children’s museology is critical in the sense of being crucial for bringing about the kind of institutional and societal changes we need in order to better recognize children’s importance to society and the inalienability of their human rights. They have much to say about the challenges facing the world today, and in many cases, more creativity and courage than the adult leaders who are failing them. In Situ. Au regard des sciences sociales, 3 | 2022 3 Discovering Child Curating Figure 1 Young curators and a museum employee examine ancient artifacts at the National Museum in Warsaw, Poland, September 2015. © Patryk Grochowalski (National Museum in Warsaw). The time is right for this ground-breaking work as it brings together several intersecting developments. Under the banners of “New Museology” (Vergo 1989) and “Critical Museology” (Shelton 2013), scholars and practitioners have called for greater inclusion of marginalized communities and diversification of exhibit content for many decades. Museums have faced controversy over their problematic representations or erasures of the experiences and contributions of many groups including women, Indigenous, Black, non-Western, queer, disabled, and other marginalized people. Yet despite their ubiquity and significance as a population, children have not received the same consideration. Meanwhile, advocates in the Children’s Rights movement, and more importantly, child activists themselves have insisted on their right to participation and selfexpression, while Child Studies and other scholars have argued that children are important social actors whose ideas, interests, and perspectives should be taken seriously. But few have recognized the museum as a crucial public site where such rights could and should be exercised. In general, museums tend to engage with children from a deficit-based approach: they are treated as liabilities in need of containment, learners in need of education, and energetic beings with short attention spans in need of entertainment. This view is revealed in and reinforced through the apparatus and physical infrastructure of the museum itself, where children are typically sequestered into side rooms and basements for separate programming and education, often via alternative entrances. Such programming is usually structured using a top-down approach in which adults set the terms of engagement, which often involves instructing children to imitate the In Situ. Au regard des sciences sociales, 3 | 2022 4 Discovering Child Curating work of adult artists or teaching them about historical events, accomplishments, or creative works enacted by adults. There are very few examples of museums that centre children as contributors of content and co-producers of knowledge. Creating opportunities for children to curate exhibitions offers a productive alternative to these trends, by recognizing that children can be a valuable resource for museums seeking to enliven their atmospheres and revisit their collections from unique perspectives. Moreover, children are experts on themselves and their experiences, and have a lot to teach us if only we are willing to learn. Providing space, resources, access, and power to children within museums is rarely and not easily done, but it is the ultimate manifestation of what a new, critical children’s museology can be. Through this project I am seeking out examples of child-centred museology taking place around the world, and working to develop models and methodologies for advancing such efforts and the knowledge that can emerge from them. Children’s museology must include collecting children’s cultural production in all of its material and intangible forms, such as artwork, writings, games, songs, and stories; but also professionally documenting and presenting their knowledge, experiences, and memories (Friend & Patterson 2022: 55-58). Consider that despite the multiple technologies of display available in museums and galleries, with some exceptions children’s artwork is usually displayed with little curatorial skill or consideration, often affixed en masse to out-of-the-way walls with masking tape. A new, critical children’s museology must also create new opportunities for young people to curate exhibitions, participate in governance, create programming, and contribute and lead in different ways. SG – One of the sub-fields you are engaged in is called “children curating”. Could you tell us more about it since French society has not really experienced it yet? MEP – As the brilliant scholar-poet-activist bell hooks once said, “Most children are amazing critical thinkers before we silence them” (Yancy 2017: 17). I would argue that they are also born curators, as I have seen with my own four-year-old. As soon as she was able to move things around, she began selecting and arranging objects for display in particular ways according to a variety of different frameworks. Sometimes these curations were organized in obviously aesthetic ways, and at other times the strategy seemed more taxonomic in nature, with groupings by type, color, size, or function. As her language abilities have developed, she increasingly employs narrative structures to explain the choices behind her assemblages which can center around a character, a story, an event, a feeling, or a memory. She is also drawing more and more from symbolic meanings and associations. With her increasing ability to express herself verbally, I am understanding more of the critical thinking behind her curations, and talking to her about them gives me a view into her very unique and often complex perspectives. Whether any of this qualifies for readers as evidence of curating or critical thinking, what is strikingly clear is the creativity involved in my daughter’s curating, her capacity to innovate, her focused efforts to arrange and interpret objects with deliberate purpose, the pleasure she takes in having others view her mini-exhibits, and her ability to find and make meaning in objects, stories, and their relationship to one another. This is what curating is all about! In Situ. Au regard des sciences sociales, 3 | 2022 5 Discovering Child Curating Figure 2 “Dinosaur extinction and climate change” Exhibit curated by Lydia Saint-Loth Patterson, age 3, Ocean View, Delaware (USA), May 2021. © Monica Eileen Patterson, with Lydia Saint-Loth Patterson’s permission. In Situ. Au regard des sciences sociales, 3 | 2022 6 Discovering Child Curating Figure 3 Arranging hands and glowing pumpkins for display, Lydia Saint-Loth Patterson, age 2, Ocean View, Delaware (USA), November 2019. © Monica Eileen Patterson, with Lydia Saint-Loth Patterson’s permission. In Situ. Au regard des sciences sociales, 3 | 2022 7 Discovering Child Curating Figure 4 “Things that Make Noise” Exhibit curated by Lydia Saint-Loth Patterson, age 3, Ocean View, Delaware (USA), January 2021. © Monica Eileen Patterson, with Lydia Saint-Loth Patterson’s permission. In Situ. Au regard des sciences sociales, 3 | 2022 8 Discovering Child Curating Figure 5 “Monster” Exhibit curated by Lydia Saint-Loth Patterson, age 4, Ocean View, Delaware (USA), June 2021. © Monica Eileen Patterson, with Lydia Saint-Loth Patterson’s permission. Museums, and especially curatorial departments are always looking for fresh perspectives and innovative approaches. In recent years museums have seen a significant shift in their exhibitions from didacticism to dialogue, curatorial authority to democratization, elitism to a more welcoming and reaffirming engagement with a broader range of works and publics. Museums have been called to acknowledge and address their colonial legacies and more equitably engage with the differences between us (e.g., Lee 2022, Lonetree 2012). Visitors, and the museums who wish to attract them, are expressing an increasing desire for participatory, multisensory, playful, and creative museum encounters. As it happens, these values align with the particular strengths of children, who are especially adept at innovating, making things fun, creating dialogue, and being creative. You can see evidence of this in many museums and galleries today, where visitors of all ages often congregate and spend the most time in interactive, child-friendly parts of exhibitions and museum spaces. So it makes sense that as experts on what children like, child curators would have a lot to offer museums and their publics. SG – Could you give us two or three examples of child curated projects that have served as milestones in the development of this curating practice worldwide? MEP – In a variety of settings, including schools, public libraries, community centres, and local museums/galleries, children have curated exhibitions of their own artworks with some frequency. The popular participatory research method referred to as “photo-voice,” in which adult researchers ask children to take photographs and use these images as a basis for further discussion and interpretation has led to a rise in child-curated or co-curated exhibitions of photographs taken by children as well. In Situ. Au regard des sciences sociales, 3 | 2022 9 Discovering Child Curating While such initiatives offer important opportunities for children to express themselves and exert their agency within local contexts, I’d like to focus on three examples in which a team of children was invited to guest curate a high-profile, wellfunded, major exhibition drawn from an established museum’s permanent collection and supported with the same professional resources as a typical adult-curated exhibition would be. Figure 6 Teamwork in the lecture theatre: curators working on exhibit interpretation at the Wallace Collection, London (Great-Britain), 2010. © Edwina Mileham. One of the earliest documented examples I’ve found was titled “Shhh…It’s a Secret!” hosted by The Wallace Collection, Hertford House, in Manchester Square, London in 2010. Museum staff invited twelve children between the ages of nine and eleven from a neighboring primary school to curate an exhibit of their own design over the course of the school year. The young curators met with staff members from all departments of the museum to learn about curating, interpretation, design, marketing, and finance, before identifying the theme of their exhibition and selecting works of art from the main collection to display within it. The curators were involved in all decision-making, wrote the object labels, created press releases, and gave interviews and exhibit tours. As museum educator Emma Bryant described, “the exhibition uncovered secret stories, unraveled symbols, and discovered compartments behind some of the most enigmatic pieces in the collection. There were objects from across the museum: paintings, furniture, sculpture, armor and porcelain. Each piece had a text panel and activity which revealed its secret” (Bryant 2011: 394). Visitors moved through three galleries that transitioned from dark to light to symbolize the act of discovery before encountering the final ‘Mystery Object’ In Situ. Au regard des sciences sociales, 3 | 2022 10 Discovering Child Curating whose provenance and function were unknown. They were invited to share their guesses about the object, in addition to relevant stories inspired by the exhibition, and feedback for the curators. The exhibition was very popular with the public, and exceeded the museum staff’s expectations. Most notable was the level of care and professionalism of the young curators, the innovative and engaging curatorial theme they developed, and the multiple opportunities they built into the exhibit for audience participation and dialogue. The exhibition’s production process and success led to institutional change. As Bryant reported, “Many lessons were learned, the most important one not to assume what children like and want from museums” (ibid: 398). Figure 7 Exhibition label written by child curators from the “Shhh… It’s a Secret” exhibition at the Wallace Collection (London, Great-Britain) in 2010. Reproduction Wallace Collection. Another excellent example I can mention is the “Anything Goes” exhibition at the National Museum in Warsaw, Poland in 2016. As I describe in a recent article in Museum and Society, “this ground-breaking exhibition radically broke from current and traditional museological practice by offering prominent institutional space and professional support for children’s cultural production in the form of curated exhibition galleries and programming” (Patterson 2021: 330). The exhibition was curated by 69 children, aged six-fourteen, who responded to the Museum’s open call and met for four hours on Saturdays over the course of six months. They worked in six teams, and like the previous group, received training from all departments, had access to the permanent collection, and were empowered to make curatorial decisions about how and what they would display. They authored curatorial statements and labels, recorded audio guides, created educational materials, and gave interviews and tours. “Anything Goes” consisted of six different exhibitions In Situ. Au regard des sciences sociales, 3 | 2022 11 Discovering Child Curating displayed in separate but connected galleries on the main floor. Rather than relying on traditional art historical logics of contextualization grounded in historical periods and geographies or assessments of skill and artistry, the curators developed more creative and less elitist ways of engaging with and valuing the works they selected for display. For instance, in the “Ghost Room” gallery, visitors were purposely but playfully frightened by eerie lighting, motion-activated silhouettes of squawking birds perched on paintings representing grisly subjects like decaying zombies, a ringing antique telephone with a scary soundtrack should one choose to answer it, decrepit furniture, and partially covered disturbing images that one could reveal if they were feeling brave. Such active, multi-sensory engagement on the part of visitors was a trademark of the exhibition. In a gallery titled “Playing the Hero,” participants had to work together to answer questions about the heroic figures on display via a specially designed, large, interactive crossword puzzle that lit up to reveal the exhibit motto, “courage”. In the “Dance of the Minotaur” gallery, visitors had to navigate through a labyrinth of wooden walls where objects were displayed, and in a reversal of the usual “adults only” spaces sometimes found in museums, young visitors could crawl through child-sized doorways to discover hidden treasures. Figure 8 Manipulable PVC cover over print of Władysław Podkowiński’s Studium Szkieletu (1892), coal and gouache on paper, “Anything Goes” exhibition, National Museum in Warsaw (Poland), 2016. © Monika Bajkowska (National Museum in Warsaw). In Situ. Au regard des sciences sociales, 3 | 2022 12 Discovering Child Curating Figure 9 Animated artwork projection and interactive crossword puzzle designed by child curators of the “Playing the Hero” gallery in the “Anything Goes” exhibition, National Museum in Warsaw (Poland), 2016. © Monika Bajkowska (National Museum in Warsaw). Figure 10 Still from triptych film and labyrinth walls for ‘Dance of the Minotaur’ Gallery in the “Anything Goes” exhibition, National Museum in Warsaw (Poland), 2016. © Monika Bajkowska (National Museum in Warsaw). In Situ. Au regard des sciences sociales, 3 | 2022 13 Discovering Child Curating In 2019, the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya Museum (CSMVS) in Mumbai, India opened a permanent Children’s Museum on its grounds, with an inaugural exhibition titled “Footsteps… to Framing the Future” curated for and by children. The museum encompasses indoor and outdoor spaces, and was designed to engage children through all their senses. As reported by Mohua Das in The Times of India, the grounds feature an amphitheatre, a terrace deck that doubles as a tree house, gardens, and a mock archaeological pit (Das 2019). Inside, there is a multipurpose hall, a library and reading corner, and exhibition space. Twenty-five curators between the ages of eight and fourteen were selected by museum staff from a pool of applicants to a city-wide essay and art competition titled, “My Little Museum: The Museum Of My Dreams”. (One would hope to see a child-led process in future iterations of this selection process for future curators of the rotating core exhibit, which will take place every six months.) Ten of the children worked on a film documenting the curation process under a professional mentor while the other fifteen attended weekend workshops on curating and exhibition design for five months. Rejecting the museum staff’s initial themes, which included “animals in Indian art” and “evolution of modes of transport,” the curators chose to explore the theme of “values” in their exhibit, specifically friendship, teamwork, environmental consciousness, peace, and courage. The twenty-two objects they chose to display were drawn from the CSMVS permanent collection with a few loans. They ranged from ancient sculptures to contemporary paintings, presented through a narrative focused on the symbolic resonance of the objects in the eyes of the child curators. All three of these exhibitions shared some striking outcomes that are worth noting. In each exhibition, the child curators developed creative narrative frameworks that transcended the dominant norms favored within art historical approaches, and selected previously overlooked works from their institutions’ permanent collections for display. They created imaginative interpretations of objects’ fictionalized provenance, meaning, and function, in a fresh alternative to the well-worn tropes of standard curatorial frameworks and dry facts. At multiple points in their exhibitions, the curators asked visitors to actively and sometimes collectively engage with the content before them, making space for everyone to offer their own interpretations. This democratizing approach was embedded within the curatorial process and carried through to the public facing exhibition in engaging, effective, and affective ways. For museums seeking to enliven their curatorial content for a more enjoyable visitor experience, curating with children is a surefire approach to meet those goals. SG – In your opinion, what are the main challenges and contributions that child curating approaches present to museums now and in the future? MEP – The greatest challenge to a new, critical children’s museology is the preconceptions of adults. Many museum practitioners continue to see children as a problem, a threat, or a diversion from their core missions and prioritized constituents rather than a resource or potential asset to the institution. The historical marginalization of children and the particular forms that it takes within museums cohere around the dominant assumption that children are more of an institutional burden than a resource. As a result, museums have failed to recognize children’s tremendous potential as contributors to their institutions, and their capacity for creative cultural production, critical interpretation, and curatorial innovation in particular. In Situ. Au regard des sciences sociales, 3 | 2022 14 Discovering Child Curating Another factor limiting what we might learn from children’s curatorial production is that most museum collections consist of material and intangible culture almost exclusively created by and for adults. This is especially concerning given the current times we are living in. In our recent article titled “Beyond Window Rainbows: Collecting Children’s Culture in the COVID Crisis”, Rebecca Friend and I argue that “children are crucial citizens whose knowledge, perspectives, and experiences must be collected and preserved during this historic moment and beyond, in ways that attend to the particular circumstances they face as multiply marginalized museum constituents and members of society” (Patterson & Friend 2021). Equity is a third challenge I would like to mention. Overwhelmingly, museums remain privileged spaces that are not equally accessible or welcoming to all. As we have seen in the recent calls to decolonize museums, for instance, the question of how to engage and share resources with constituencies that have not been represented or included in the work of museums is more relevant than ever. Broadbased institutional transformation is needed in order to diversify museum collections, exhibitions, staff, and visitors. Thinking about issues of race, class, gender, sexuality, dis/ability, and more are very important in order to ensure that a new, critical children's museology is not just for white, middle and upper-class children in the global north, but that it provides opportunity for all children without forcing them to conform to dominant frameworks. For instance, when children’s artistic productions are collected or curated, do they represent the rich range of forms, genres, and communities that exist in the world, or do they continue to centre white, Western cultural traditions, artistic genres, and heritage? How can museums engage with all children, and not just privileged, predominantly white, middle and upper-class children who already enjoy the most access to museums and their programming? Then there is the question of resources. Child-centred approaches take time, and require a lens shift for most adults that may not be intuitive. Greater awareness of and training in child-centred approaches is needed in order to prioritize children’s perspectives and voices and avoid adult projections and interpellations. Then museums must commit to these practices and commit to sharing power with children (and other historically marginalized publics). In her influential book, The Participatory Museum, Museum Studies scholar Nina Simon offers a helpful metaphor for understanding the demands and benefits of participatory projects, which she likens to cooking with children (Simon 2010: 197). If the end goal is to bake a cake, including a child is not the fastest or most efficient way to do so. But many other gains are realized through the process, including relationship building, skill acquisition, and not least, fun! So in some senses, curating with children is like cooking with children: it is not the most efficient way to produce an exhibition. While it may take more time, oversight, training, and patience, what can be gained in terms of innovation, creativity, and public engagement is substantial and timely, as these are the very areas that museums are seeking to improve upon right now. The gains of such work, particularly in terms of the knowledge and perspectives that can be shared by child curators, are manifold. As key sites of public memory and history, museums provide an important record of humankind. In some countries, children and youth make up almost half of the population. It is crucial that their In Situ. Au regard des sciences sociales, 3 | 2022 15 Discovering Child Curating experiences and views be documented, collected, preserved, and exhibited. As I have argued previously, “Children are keen observers, skilled innovators, creative producers, full-time learners, and important contributors to their households and communities. Taking them seriously by engaging with them as contributors of content and programming will provide a richer, more insightful archive for future generations… while promoting diversity and inclusion in museum institutions and society at large. Such a move has the potential to radically transform museums by helping to further democratize all aspects of museum content and practice. The time for children to join the ranks of museum communities as valued contributors to content and programming is past due” (Patterson 2020). I therefore urge museums and other cultural institutions to create opportunities for children to participate more actively and directly, not only as curators, but as contributors of content, as tour guides, as board members, as educators, and in other roles. SG – Our readers will surely want to know more about child curating. Could you recommend some further readings or digital projects they may look at? MEP – Due to children’s subaltern social status, the precious nature of museum and art gallery collections, and the elitism of most museological institutions, children have not been given many opportunities to curate their own exhibitions. The track record is somewhat better for the slightly older category of “youth,” but within museums, young people are typically engaged through the less powerful and prestigious departments tasked with education, programming, and outreach, rather than curating and research. In addition to these structural barriers, museum engagements with children (and any creative works emanating from them) are not usually funded, documented, preserved, or publicized to the degree that adult engagements are (such as guest curated exhibitions, tours, public lectures, or panel discussions). This means that finding examples of children’s curation is often an elusive quest for the ephemeral and the undocumented, making it very difficult to know what is happening within this exciting domain across the globe. I would love to learn of any initiatives that readers may be familiar with, including curatorial projects beyond museum walls happening in and around schools, community centres, and everyday spaces. To that end, I am excited to share a book project that I have been working on with my colleague Ceciel Brouwer, Research Associate at the Research Centre for Museums and Galleries (RCMG) in the School of Museum Studies at the University of Leicester in the UK. We received a tremendous response to our call for papers for a forthcoming book we are co-editing on the topic of Children’s Museology. It is an attempt to survey this exciting and emergent field, and to learn more about childcentred initiatives employing museological strategies, both within and outside official museum spaces. Questions and requests for further information may be directed to: [email protected]. Inviting children to serve as curators is still a novel idea. More often, museums solicit contributions from children and youth for selective inclusion in exhibitions curated by adults. For some recent pandemic-related examples, check out the Royal Ontario Museum of Toronto, Canada’s #MyPandemicStory exhibit curated from artworks by Ontario youth aged four to eighteen; the National Museums of Liverpool’s “My Home is My Museum” mini exhibits curated by children between four and eleven years of age from their personal collections of objects and artwork at home; the Arts Council In Situ. Au regard des sciences sociales, 3 | 2022 16 Discovering Child Curating of England’s “The Way I See It,” an online exhibition of 22 submissions from young people aged 2-18 years old exploring how the pandemic has changed their lives; and Museum of Childhood Ireland’s “Children’s Voices Project 2020 & 2021 Together, Le Chéile” which started as an online exhibition of Irish children’s works responding to the pandemic, and expanded to include outdoor public installations and the participation of several other countries. Here are three other exciting initiatives to explore: • Founded in 2003, the UK-based Kids in Museums organization works with museums nationwide to make them more welcoming of children, young people, and families. They host an annual Museum Takeover Day, when participating museums, galleries, and heritage sites invite young people in to take over jobs normally done by adults, and a Digital Takeover Day, when young people take control of museums’ social media accounts. • The Sugar Hill Children’s Museum of Art & Storytelling in New York, New York is a unique example of an institution that from its inception recognized its young audience as not only receivers of art and stories, but vital contributors as well. Exhibitions and programming focus on children aged 3-8 years, and include a regular rotation of opportunities for active child participation, collaboration, and cultural production that is included in exhibitions and documented by the museum. • With a mandate to document and explore the heritage of childhood and the role that children play in society, the Cape Town Museum of Childhood is a multi-faceted, interactive space with a variety of programming that allows an opportunity for children, families, and communities to celebrate childhood and learn from children about their experiences and perspectives. They have facilitated several community-based, child-curated exhibitions and offer skills-based training that empowers children to tell their own stories and forms of artistic expression, including visual art, dance, poetry, and music. BIBLIOGRAPHY BRYANT Emma, 2011, “A Museum Gives Power to Children”, Curator: The Museon Journal, Vol 54, no. 4, p. 389-398. DAS Mohua, 2019, “Mumbai gets a children’s museum at CSMVS,” The Times of India, March 10. Available online, https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/mumbai/mumbai-gets-a-childrensmuseum-at-csmvs/articleshow/68339723.cms [link valid in November 2022]. FRIEND Rebecca & PATTERSON Monica Eileen, 2022, “Echoes of Experience: Encountering Children and Childhood in the Canadian History Hall”, Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures, 13.2, Winter, p. 53-80. LEE Shimrit, 2022, Decolonize Museums, United States, Books, LLC. LONETREE Amy, 2012, Decolonizing Museums: Representing Native America in National and Tribal Museums, Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press. In Situ. Au regard des sciences sociales, 3 | 2022 17 Discovering Child Curating PATTERSON Monica Eileen, 2020, “Children’s Museology and the COVID-19 Crisis”, American Alliance of Museums, [online], https://www.aam-us.org/2020/09/18/childrens-museology-andthe-covid-19-crisis/ [link valid in November 2022]. PATTERSON Monica Eileen, 2021, “Toward a Critical Children’s Museology: The Anything Goes Exhibition at the National Museum in Warsaw”, Museum and Society, vol. 19, no. 3, p. 330-50, [online], journals.le.ac.uk/ojs1/index.php/mas/article/view/3393/3333 https://doi. org/ 10.29311/mas.v19i3.3393 [link valid in November 2022]. PATTERSON Monica Eileen, LEHRER Erica & MILTON Cynthia E. (dir.), 2011, Curating Difficult Knowledge: Violent Pasts in Public Places, Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, New York, Palgrave Macmillan, coll. “Palgrave Macmillan memory studies”. PATTERSON Monica Eileen, MURPHY Edward, COHEN David William et al. (dir.), 2011, Anthrohistory: Unsettling Knowledge and Questioning Discipline, Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press. PATTERSON Monica Eileen & FRIEND Rebecca, 2021, “Beyond Window Rainbows: Collecting Children’s Culture in the COVID Crisis”, Collections: A Journal for Museums and Archive Professionals, vol. 17, no. 2, p. 167-178. Available online, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/ 10.1177/1550190620980836 [link valid in November 2022]. SHELTON Anthony, 2013, “Critical Museology: A Manifesto”, Museum Worlds, vol. 1, no. 1, p. 7-23. SIMON Nina, 2010, The Participatory Museum, Santa Cruz, Museum 2.0. VERGO Peter, 1989, The New Museology, London, Reaktion Books, coll. « Critical views ». YANCY George, 2017, On Race. 23 Conversations in a Time of Crisis, Oxford University Press. ABSTRACTS In this interview by Dr. Sarah Gensburger, Dr. Monica Eileen Patterson discusses an emerging subfield of curatorial practice being facilitated by more and more museums around the world: child curating. Creating opportunities for children to curate exhibitions offers many benefits to museums seeking to animate and enliven their offerings, for children are experts of innovation, creativity, and interactivity. By critically engaging with exhibitions curated by children, scholars and members of society more broadly can gain valuable insights into young people’s perspectives and experiences. As important social actors and knowledge-bearers, children have much to teach the world they inhabit, if only the adults around them will listen. In this interview, Patterson lays out her vision for a new, critical children’s museology and the crucial role of children’s curating within it. She shares how her interest in this field developed, the contributions child curators can make to museological practice, and the challenges children and museums face in taking this work forward. INDEX Keywords: children, museums, curating, children’s museology, exhibitions In Situ. Au regard des sciences sociales, 3 | 2022 18 Discovering Child Curating AUTHORS MONICA EILEEN PATTERSON Associate Professor, Carleton University [email protected] SARAH GENSBURGER Directrice de recherche, CNRS [email protected] In Situ. Au regard des sciences sociales, 3 | 2022 19