Archival Attunements: Researching Children’s Drawings “About the War”

Abstract

Based on the author’s experiences of working with materials from the Dale B. Harris Papers, specifically a series of children’s drawings “about the war,” this article engages the concept of attunement as a strategy to address the challenges of encountering children’s creations from the past. The article begins with an introduction to the concept of attunement, drawing into dialogue the work of Erin Manning and Jane Bennett, for example, as well as related scholarship from art education, qualitative studies, and childhood studies. This introduction is then used to express how the concept of attunement has been central to the author’s approach to researching childhood art. After discussing the connection between attunement and the author’s practice as a researcher, the idea of archival attunements is introduced, a turn of phrase used to animate the experiences, potentials, and challenges of encountering children’s art from the past.