Curating (entangled) childhood(s): Narrating the past/extracting the future

The V&A Museum of Childhood in London was recently rebranded as the Young V&A and reinvented as a ‘powerhouse of creativity’. No longer solely exhibiting objects that represent the material culture of childhood, the Young V&A now curates children’s experiences as they interact with the material and ideational fabric of the museum. While supportive of the Young V&A’s child-centric ethos, this article engages critically with the future being extracted from childhood through the alignment of museum programming with the truth claims of NEAR science (Neuroscience, Epigenetics, Adverse childhood experiences, Resilience), together with the axioms of enterprise culture and philanthrocapitalism. This process of alignment is entangled in a developmental temporality which is also an extractive teleology. At stake is the im/possibility of refusing a future which is both a continuation of the neo-liberal present and the recapitulation of a colonial past.