Childhood Art: A Journal Featuring Diverse, Accessible, Cutting-Edge Research

As scholars look for new zippier and pithier ways to disseminate their work, web-based, open-access journals with content shared for free have become the chosen method to keep the conversation going. The University of Arkansas Press is proud to present Childhood Art: An International Journal of Research—a digital platform supported through a partnership with the Center for the Study of Childhood Art in the School of Art at the University of Arkansas meant for scholars in art education to openly share their work.

Starting in fall 2023, this initiative for research on children's art will offer researchers at our growing Center for the Study of Childhood Art the ability to connect with the global academic community as well as the means for scholars in art education to connect with their communities of peers. Christopher Schulte, the center’s founding director and the journal’s managing editor, broadly describes the makeup of this research community in a recent interview: "Childhood art studies is a multidisciplinary community, comprised of scholar-practitioners from art education, early childhood and elementary education, and language and literacy studies." 

So far there have not been numerous journal venues for scholars looking to share their work on children's art, at least not outside paywalls. "Childhood Art: An International Journal of Research aims to provide this space and to invite scholar-practitioners from around the world to contribute to and define its possibilities for impact," Schulte points out. The reasoning behind making this journal open-access has to do precisely with what the term suggests—accessabilty: 

Many journals today exist behind paywalls, a reality that excludes whole networks of people and communities from accessing the research that is published. . . . Our goal is to directly intervene by creating a journal that features diverse, cutting edge research . . . as accessible as possible.

The work of the Center for the Study of Childhood Art, which is brought to bear in this initiative, aims to reconceptualize the study of childhood art, addressing the issues of how children come to engage in art work and why they make art as they do while remaining critical to shaping and re-shaping the study of childhood art. For Schulte, this means "questioning existing systems of knowledge and the extent to which such systems have and continue to disempower children, decontextualize their bodies and lives, and delegitimize their artistic practices." In this effort, Childhood Art  will stay committed to "theorizing and historicizing the child, children, childhoods, and childhood art within contemporary social, cultural, and global contexts."