In The End of Forgetting: Growing Up with Social Media, Kate Eichhorn (2019) made a compelling claim about the state of childhood in contemporary life, arguing that “the real crisis of the digital age is not the disappearance of childhood, but the spectre of a childhood that can never be forgotten”(p. 12). For Eichhorn (2019), this contemporary problem of “perpetual childhood”(p. 12) promised by the fidelity of digitization is one that emerges out of understandings of childhood as a discursive site of both memory and forgetting. For example, Eichhorn (2019) referred to Sigmund Freud’s (1915) theory of memories of childhood as concealing or screen memories. For Freud, memories of childhood are never accurate representations of the past, but rather, a curation of the past in the present that involves processes of forgetting. Eichhorn’s (2019) focus on the distinct conditions of digital life is important to the question of whether forgetting is even possible in the perpetual trail of images and artifacts that children of the digital revolution create to represent themselves. If “maturation is as much an accumulation of knowledge as it is an accumulation of forgetting”(Eichhorn, 2019, p. 22), then what is at stake in an era when we cannot detach from our childhood is growing up itself. While the conditions that Eichhorn (2019) described are unique to the digital era, the politics of memory remain familiar to certain populations of people, particularly those who have been and continue to be colonized and racialized. These are also the same people who have been perpetually framed as culturally, socially, and politically childlike for the last 500years as justification for the interventions that claim to socialize and civilize them (Nandy, 1984). To those subject to colonization and its racializing processes, the question of growing up has always been a troubling spectre. What then does it mean for those who have been, as Franz Fanon (1952/2008) put it, woven out of a “thousand details, anecdotes, and stories”(p. 91) of being childlike to grow up alongside White spectres of childhood that refuse to fade away? Does growing up demand their acquiescence to the hierarchies of knowledge defined by a settler colonial past?

Eichhorn (2019), drawing on the horrors of WWII, argued that forgetting past experiences, particularly the most embarrassing and painful ones, may be necessary in order to “move on and live a full and productive life in the present”(p. 17). Yet, the articles in this issue of Curriculum Inquiry invite us to consider the symbolic and material violence of intentional forgetting, namely the erasure and exclusion of colonial, racist, and heteropatriarchal histories that are part and parcel of this violence. We find