The Children’s ‘68

This project analysed 1968 as a watershed moment in children’s culture and its related disciplines, following Marwick’s (1998) now canonical definition of 1968 as the crystallisation of the cultural revolution of the ‘long sixties’ (c.1958-c.1974). We pursued this objective with specialists from cognate fields within childhood studies, including children’s history and media, children’s culture, heritage and art education, and bring them into dialogue with historians of 1968. This new collaboration brought together researchers and practitioners from Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Sweden and the UK. By thinking about children’s culture as a site for artistic and intellectual experimentation, at the centre of ideological activity across disciplinary boundaries and national borders, this project opened up new ways of understanding the 1968 liberation movements and their legacies. Culminating in a series of public events and exhibitions in 2018 for the fiftieth anniversary of 1968, it brought the children’s perspective into scholarly debate and public commemorations.