Paper short abstract:

I will present the Children's pandemic archive - the collection of Polish children’s accounts about coronavirus. I will identify the benefits for anthropologists from such collections. I will ask what image of children’s pandemic lives do we get from the archive, and what remains hidden from researchers?

Paper long abstract:

In March 2020, shortly after the schools were closed, I together with the Childhood Studies Interdisciplinary Research Team (University of Warsaw), started collecting children’s accounts about the pandemic. Via the social media and with the help of parents, teachers and journalists we managed to gather several dozen works, mainly drawings and photographs, but also letters, diaries, and song’s lyrics.

We made all the works accessible for researchers and the general public, by creating a website on which the whole Children’s pandemic archive can be found (https://mip.uw.edu.pl/en/).

With our archive’s project, we would like to allow children’s voices to be heard. We would like to find out what children think about the current situation, and how they feel about it, but we didn’t have a chance to speak to the authors of the works gathered in the Archive.

Moreover, that with the Children’s pandemic archive we were only able to reach a specific group of young people: mostly children from middle class families, whose parents made the effort of photographing the works and sending them to us. Therefore we treat this collection rather as a resource that allows us to map the important issues and formulate meaningful questions to ask children in the future interviews.

In my presentation I will identify the benefits for anthropologists from such collections. I will ask what we can learn from this archive about children and their pandemic experiences. What image of children’s pandemic lives do we get from this collection, and what remains hidden from researchers?