ABSTRACT
Aspects of contemporary cultural theory focus on biography and autobiography, in terms both of collecting oral A histories and of the production of the life story. Alongside these documentations lie theorizations of life histories and autobiographical narratives. The author's interest is in how children speak about and imagine their lives, and thus give voice to their own developing autobiographies. She explores the emotional and social dynamics that come to bear on their subjectivity. The author's work comes from interviews with children aged between seven and eleven, an age group that has been largely neglected theoretically and about which there is little detailed knowledge. The children come from a newly built school with approximately two hundred pupils. The classes for the seven- and eight-year-olds have had the same cohort of pupils throughout, while the class for the nine-year-olds has a history of continually taking in new pupils, frequently refugees.
