Phase Two: The Present

Phase Two involves working in partnership with young people, care experienced adults, and care workers to explore what types of everyday information or records they would like to be able to access, at what point in their lives, and why. From this, we will work together to create “ living archives “ that will be accessible to those who live and work, or have lived or worked, in the residential children’s homes. This phase will run from September 2021 until March 2024.


Phase Two Updates

November 2023

In November, Siân Lucas (ARCH co-investigator) and Laura MacDonald (Social Worker, Birthlink Scotland) went on a fieldtrip to Germany. The full blog about their trip can be read here.

July 2023

In July, Mervyn Miller (Scottish advisory group member), Skye Foster (Co-Researcher) and Andrew Burns (Research Fellow) travelled to Berlin to meet Tanja Abou who is a member of the German advisory group.  Tanja is an academic working for the Institute for Social and Organisational Pedagogy at The University of Hildesheim. She is also a DJ, queer activist, and all-round cool person, who also happens to have lived experience of the care system in Germany. Check out the blog post here for more about their Berlin trip.

June 2023

In June, we held a free event open to anyone interested in memory and record keeping for children and young people in care. This one-day event brought together people from a variety of backgrounds to discuss, problematise and present current issues, innovations and research on memory keeping & records in residential childcare. Check out the Events page for more detail.

April 2023

Check out our latest blog post here for an update on phase 2 data collection.

November 2022

We are currently working with young people and adults at a children’s home in Scotland to explore their ideas for the living archive. They are in the process of recording potential content for the archive, which we will then discuss as a group in terms of what should be included, consent processes for those who are in pictures/videos/audio content, and who should have access to the archive. Malte Heyen, our colleague from Germany who is leading on IT and technology, recently visited the home in Scotland to discuss the potential look and functionality of the archive.

Phase Three: The Future

Theme by the University of Stirling