The project “Children and Catastrophes in fictional narratives” (ChilCa) derives from the notion that a sense of catastrophe has marked the contemporary Western world since the early 20th century. Phenomena such as world war, genocides, the atomic bomb, terrorist attacks, global warming and refugee crisis have shaped the cultural imagination. Cultural expressions such as literature, film and the news media give form to and mediate catastrophes, thereby making sense of them. In both literature and the media, the featuring of children (defined as human beings below the age of 18) in catastrophe situations has been widespread and in fiction, children function as recurrent types (e.g. savior, warrior, witness). Arguably, catastrophes not only reach children through news media, they are also a vital part of children’s own culture in form of works of fiction, films and tv-games. Furthermore, in recent years, the actual experiences of children themselves have come to the foreground in among others tv-documentaries on Syria, witness accounts from e.g. WW2 and Utøya, as well as exhibitions of children’s drawings on war and catastrophes for example at The international museum of children’s art in Oslo. However, though children play a key role in the cultural imagination of catastrophes as both types, consumers and producers, there exists little research on how children figurate in catastrophe narratives, nor on how children understand news, images and narratives about catastrophes. It is this threefold connection between children and catastrophes that ChilCa seeks to investigate. ChilCa asks What are the images of catastrophe and children in fictional catastrophe narratives, and how are these images framed and interconnected with each other? The empirical material we will investigate consists of both contemporary Norwegian literary narratives in general and children’s literature and of children’s own creative writing. Our main objective is to contribute to the academic field of disaster research by exploring (1) children as central figures in literary catastrophe narratives, (2) catastrophe narratives for children and (3) investigating how children make sense of catastrophes in creative writing on catastrophes.
