About

Journal of Childhood Studies (JCS) is a peer reviewed, open access digital journal that aims to provide researchers and practitioners with a transdisciplinary space to cultivate experimental, creative, and alternative approaches to, and conceptualizations of, childhood.

JCS offers a forum for practitioners and scholars to engage in serious discussion related to the politics, tensions, and possibilities for childhood in increasingly complex and connected worlds. Articles published in the journal adopt a critical and post-developmental edge, as authors shift the conversation toward timely, innovative, and contradictory engagements with childhood that complexify traditional neoliberal, Euro-Western, or developmental understandings of children’s lives. In an effort to disrupt the violent, inequitable consequences of inherited developmental theories, JCS invites perspectives that work to resist developmental theory and developmentally-grounded understandings of childhood. The journal maintains a strong commitment to practice and recognizes the need for an accessible, high-quality online platform for practitioners to discuss the evolving and generative tensions they face in their work with children.

JCS includes a unique combination of submissions from practitioners, early career academics, and established scholars from a variety of international disciplines. Research articles, discussions of policy, practice-oriented contributions, and conceptual work that employ an innovative edge in their engagements with childhood are welcome. Practitioners and researchers worldwide are invited to submit manuscripts to the journal.

Through encouraging the submission of innovative manuscripts authored by practitioners, the journal supports practice-oriented submissions that bring a critical consciousness to understanding children’s everyday encounters and mobilize the theoretical perspectives emphasized within the journal through actionable, grounded, accountable practices. The journal also endeavors to support the work of young scholars and graduate students in an effort to add to the contributions of established and international researchers that are published in the journal.

The diversity of content in the journal opens space for alternative, critical, and contradictory ways of knowing that are relevant to the increasingly complex domain of childhood.