Producing Children: Critical Studies in Childhood Creativity [Mīkstie vāki]

"Producing Children imagines the possibility, indeed the inevitability, of a creative relation between children as producers and consumers by revising the long-established, hierarchical relation between adults and children. The chapters in this collection reveal that studying child-produced culture complicates our received understandings of children's culture as culture by adults, for children, about children. They also underscore "children's literature" as a cultural phenomenon that moves across and beyond genres, forms, and media. As a whole, this collection reveals that attention to child-produced culture invites dialogue and collaboration across fields and disciplines invested in the critical understanding of children as embodied beings and childhoodas both a stage of development and discursive construct with social, political, economic, and cultural dimensions and influence. With the ongoing vibrancy of childhood studies as a multidisciplinary area of inquiry, studies of child-produced culture provide scholars with an exciting opportunity to complicate, enrich, and expand theorization of childhood creativity, children's culture, and even children themselves"--

Children’s culture is not only culture for children; it’s culture by children — yet scholars of children’s culture overwhelmingly center work by adults for children. Producing Children acknowledges and theorizes children as cultural producers, underscoring how such creativity empowers children as active participants in their own culture, and helps us to reconceive our understandings of children themselves.

Producing Children imagines the possibility, indeed the inevitability, of a creative relation between children as producers and consumers by revising the long-established, hierarchical relation between adults and children. The chapters in this collection reveal that studying child-produced culture complicates our received understandings of children’s culture as culture by adults, for children, about children. They also underscore “children’s literature” as a cultural phenomenon that moves across and beyond genres, forms, and media. As a whole, this collection reveals that attention to child-produced culture invites dialogue and collaboration across fields and disciplines invested in the critical understanding of children as embodied beings and childhood as both a stage of development and discursive construct with social, political, economic, and cultural dimensions and influence. With the ongoing vibrancy of childhood studies as a multidisciplinary area of inquiry, studies of child-produced culture provide scholars with an exciting opportunity to complicate, enrich, and expand theorization of childhood creativity, children’s culture, and even children themselves.