Editorial

This special double issue of Global Studies of Childhood emerges from a shared desire to celebrate the impact of children’s art and its ability to deepen understandings of the origins and effects of social crises. Child studies scholars, psychologists, educators, clinicians, and curators have long held that making art helps children process and socialize difficult experience. In this vein, the articles compiled here offer an interdisciplinary exploration of the affective, aesthetic, and socio-political processes involved in producing and engaging with children’s art. Not faithful to one method or theoretical framework, this collection provokes the field of child studies to consider the urgency of aesthetic expression and the complicated processes involved in being called to witness children’s creativity.

Children’s art harnesses considerable affective power and as a result is and has historically been mobilized and reproduced by non-profit and political organizations for fundraising purposes, PR maneuvers, and neo-liberal campaigns. Its affective capacities, though, can also galvanize its audiences toward new ethical feelings about and responses to injustice. Because, as the field of childhood studies has rightly shown, discourses of innocence can harmfully impact children’s subject formation (Bernstein, 2011; Kincaid, 1998; Meiners, 2016), making art can remind others of their enmeshed relationship to “difficult knowledge” (Britzman and Pitt, 2004). In their own thinking about the relationship between art and conflict, Farley et al. (2012) write, “When considering aesthetics, what often comes to mind are questions about the nature of creativity, of beauty, and the sublime, and the transformative effects of creative expression. But there are also the more painful dimensions of human experience, such as melancholy, dread, and perhaps even terror” (p. 2). In asking how making, curating, and witnessing children’s art helps to register children’s affective intensities and socio-political insights, the scholarship compiled in this issue holds open the question of what it means to experience art, and in so doing, consider the long and tangled histories of childhood. This issue offers a contribution to the building of a conceptual, transhistorical, and qualitative framework with which to describe the power of children’s art to shift what we know about ourselves and the social relations to which we must be accountable.

From various geographies, traditions, historical periods, and disciplines, the authors offer commentary on the entanglements between moments of political crises, conceptualizations of childhood, and children’s inner worlds, all the while complicating the very notion of development itself. Indeed, for many of the authors, art is urgently important for its capacity to resist coercion, and to fill in the gaps between children’s experiences and the theories of development imposed onto them. For some of the authors, art offers a vehicle with which children symbolize feeling, while for others, an aesthetic form of collectivity arises from the shared experience of witnessing children’s art. Taken together, the articles re-route a discussion of children’s art away from a measure of its worth as a function of individual child development and instead, pursue its study as a form of conviviality and framing of the social impact collective moments of crises have on children’s subjectivity. That is, art becomes a mode through which to reimagine childhood itself away from universalist presumptions of child development grounded in European Enlightenment.

Drawing from over three decades of work with refugees, Glynnis Clacherty offers readers a window into experiences of displacement in her article, “Artbooks as witness of everyday resistance: Using art with displaced children living in Johannesburg, South Africa.” In writing and illustrating their own autobiographical storybooks, children are able to document their lived experiences, work through and bear witness to past trauma, and celebrate what she describes as “the small everyday overcomings of their lives” in empowering and unique ways. These artbooks enable children to share their experiences and perspectives on their own terms, thereby resisting hegemonic narratives and essentializing frameworks that so often reduce child refugees to mere victims. Crucially, Clacherty draws our attention to the varied ways that children cope with crisis as evidence of their individuality and agency, pointing to diverse acts of resistance ranging from “narrating the normal” of their quotidian lives, to documenting loss, to sharing their stories, to advocating for “changed attitudes, laws, and policies in the increasingly migrant-hostile South African society.” With the authors’ permission, some of the artbooks have been added to the digital library of the African Storybook Project.

Myriam Denov and Meaghan Shevell present insights from another autobiographical arts-based project that is based elsewhere on the continent in their article, “An arts-based approach with youth born of genocidal rape in Rwanda: The river of life as an autobiographical mapping tool.” As they describe, participants in the project were youth born of rape during the genocide, who drew maps of their lives that helped them identify and reflect on their own experiences with truth-telling and stigma within their families and communities. Importantly, these experiences included both challenges and opportunities, and, as their article proposes, enabled the young people to not only engage with their pasts, but to consider their futures. The authors found the “river of life” methodology to be adaptable not only to the particular cultural context of post-genocide Rwanda, but also the specific needs and comfort levels of individual participants. They reflect on how symbols and metaphors were used by some of the young artists to create protective distance from traumatic memories and their retellings. Denov and Shevell argue that such flexibility is crucial when conducting cross-cultural research and working with those made marginal in order to avoid ethnocentric and adult-centric approaches that further silence and exclude participants. The authors advance the importance of working in partnership with local team members and young participants to ensure collaborative and ethical procedures, and maintaining a child-centered orientation to knowledge production.

These priorities are similarly maintained in Thaís de Carvalho’s “White men and electric guns: Analyzing the Amazonian dystopia through Shipibo-Konibo children’s drawings.” Attending closely to the knowledge and experiences of Indigenous children, the author explores the complex meanings of the Amazonian figure of the pishtaco, a White man who attacks Indigenous people using electric currents and sophisticated technology to steal their organs for money. She traces the colonial histories that helped produce this myth as an articulation of “structural racialized violence toward native peoples, and the troubled relationships of Andean nations with foreign powers” to consider the changing features of pishtacos. Learning from a group of 9–12 year old Shipibo-Konibo children who gathered on her porch to discuss and create collective drawings of the pishtaco, de Carvalho analyses these artistic productions to gain insight into social, environmental, and cultural dynamics at the micro community level, and to enrich understandings of racialized, socio-historical relations in Peru.

In his article, Christopher Shulte proposes that art education was an “early embodiment” of positivism in child development theory. In “Childhood drawing: The making of a deficit aesthetic,” he explains that in the field of art education the “prevailing tendency has been to conceptualize the artistic lives and experiences of children as acts of preparation” for a future not yet lived. Schulte offers Viktor Lowenfeld’s typology of artistic development, one that is assembled in stages of growth, as an example. In seeking a revision to the developmental paradigm that relies on a notion of children’s art as inherently incomplete, Schulte asks that studies of childhood attend to children’s art as a form of participation in the complexities of relationality and social life.

Marion Selfridge, Jennifer Claire Robinson, and Lisa Mitchell turn our attention to the collective healing made possible by an aesthetic encounter with an exhibit grounded in community exchange in their article, “heART space: Curating community grief from overdose.” In describing how an empty store was remade into a gallery, they gather theory and method to produce insight into the translation of grief into social action. The authors describe a community arts exhibit where “taking care” became a methodological enterprise for interrupting ignorance concerning the “structural violence that underlies the current opioid crises.” In their contribution, Selfridge, Robinson, and Mitchell extend the boundaries of art to include poetry and sculpture, contending that their sonic and tactile functions be understood as aesthetic expression. In offering a story of obligation and ethics in relation to the opioid crises, the authors not only describe the art that was shown in the exhibit, but the process of the exhibit’s construction as related to healing. For them, curation is a form of care, whereby the young artist invites a form of ethical witnessing and it is then the adult’s ethical duty to respond.

In “Fierce flames: Evoking wildfire disaster emotions through children’s drawings,” Ana Sofia Ribeiro and Isabel Silva present insights into environmental and social disaster gleaned from children. Using environmental philosophy to frame an analysis of drawings produced by children affected by wildfires in Portugal, they ask us to consider the artwork as expressive of concern for ecological damage. In describing the social life of “natural” disasters, the authors propose that children and childhood are given an ambivalent status in discourses of disaster preparedness, thus embodying “the contradiction between principles of protection and participation.” For them, children’s drawings offer expression of how their emotional lives are impacted by this contradiction and help to symbolize the relationship between feeling, climate, disaster, and childhood.

As a body of work, the articles compiled make an original contribution to transnational studies of children, childhood, and crisis. Insisting that art, as material practice, knowledge production, communication, and symbolization is worthy of more appreciation by scholars and practitioners across multiple fields, they carefully show how paying attention to children’s art for its transformational qualities can provide deep insight into children’s worlds and adults’ ethical failures. Allowing for non-linear expressions of time and meaning-making, children’s art offers its producers dynamic avenues for expression and engagement unbound by the limitations of language, affective regimes, and adult-centrism. In destabilizing the temporal progressions of what is often termed “development,” the authors offer a conversation about childhood that culls knowledge from beyond one geographical location and proposes art as a coalitional mode of relation.

The editors would like to thank Brooklyn Ciccotelli for her invaluable administrative assistance with this project, and Nicola Yelland for her patience, counsel, and sharp editorial guidance. We also offer our deep appreciation to all of the reviewers who made time to provide their critical feedback in the midst of the rapidly-unfolding COVID-19 pandemic. Thanks too to the authors, whose individual and collective efforts contribute to our understanding of children, art, and crisis. Finally, we thank the many children whose artwork and reflections have provided great insights for those who engage with them.