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 sociopolitical 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.