Description
In 2023, the Imperial War Museum (London) curated an exhibition entitled War Games, the ‘UK’s first exhibition to explore what video games tell us about conflict’. Ten years previously, the V&A Museum of Childhood (London) had curated an exhibition of the same name, focused more broadly on a range of war play and war toys. The opening text panel that greeted visitors to this exhibition stated;
‘The vast majority of children play with toy weapons… The use of toy guns by children is often discouraged, and is seen as glamorising and encouraging violence. However, the links between playing with toy guns and increased aggression are not clear’.
This paper explores what we might learn from paying attention to the informal learning spaces of museums and museum exhibitions in relation to debates regarding children, childhoods and militarism. For example, to what extent do these exhibitions reproduce and amplify discourses of militarism? Or in what ways do they seek to challenge and question the entanglement of children, childhood and war play? And how might we make space for audience/child agency in relation to the exhibitions that they encounter? Conceptually, this paper seeks to bring together recent work on childhood and politics (e.g. Beier & Tabak (2020) on childhood and everyday militarisms, Woodyer and Carter (2020) on the geopolitics of play, and Carter & Woodyer (2023) on childhood agency and resistance), with work on the politics of curating war in museum settings (e.g. Lisle 2006, Van Veeren 2020, Sylvester 2018).
