The Ark, Dublin: Children’s Cultural Archives and the Space in Between

Abstract

This research paper addresses the poetics and politics of the children’s cultural archive held at The Ark, a custom-built children’s cultural centre in the heart of Dublin city, Ireland, that opened its doors to the public in 1995. This is one of several outputs from the ongoing LA-TRAC project, a collaboration between The Ark and the School of English, Trinity College Dublin. The ultimate goal of the LA-TRAC project is to use the archive held at The Ark to establish a Living Archive for Teachers, Researchers, Artists, and Children. The LA-TRAC project asks – how do we go about creating living cultural archives with, about, and for children? In this paper, I reflect on the early stages of the research, map out the nature of The Ark archive, and highlight its research potential and possibilities. The first two sections provide an overview of the archive and theorise its distinct nature in terms of child and adult voices; the following three sections set out the potential of the archive to contribute to and advance broader cultural debates on the politics of childhood in Ireland, on Irish theatre history, and on marginalised voices. I suggest that the exploration of the potential of The Ark archive may act as a model for the research and development of children’s cultural archives across Europe. This study, therefore, may be of particular interest to other researchers working in the field of children’s cultural archives.