Children at Home in the Archives

Sarah Carter and Samantha Comerford

This semester, Samantha Comerford is assisting me in my course on the material culture of childhood. A key set of sources for our course are objects made by or for children, housed in the Helen Louise Allen Textile Collection in the School of Human Ecology at UW-Madison. These objects--from paper-dresses and baby bonnets, to playful gloves and careful samplers--help bring past childhoods to life and force us to think through the relationships between children's lived experiences at home and the ideals of childhood preserved in the archive. In this session we propose to offer a virtual object study visit and to play a collaborative game rooted in design thinking methods to help make sense of these historic objects.