This book addresses the inherent ambiguities in ‘childhood’, a widely familiar term. The main problem lies in the definition, duration and diverse socio-cultural implications of ‘childhood’, which is a part of everyone’s life. To explore the literary, artistic and cultural representation of this constantly evolving term, this book provides insights into a number of relevant issues relating to childhood. Explicitly rejecting the idea of childhood as an unambiguous monolith, it offers various critical approaches to the treatment of childhood with all its complexities in art and literature.

What happens when the assumptions and practices of museum curators and art educators intersect with the assumptions and practices of publishing for children? This study explores how over three hundred children's picture books, most of them published in the last three decades in English, introduce children to art and art museums. It considers how the books emerge from and relate to a range of theories and assumptions about childhood and childhood development, children's literature and culture, illustration, visual art, museology, and art education. As well as examining how these theories and assumptions influence what picture books teach young readers about visiting museums and about how to look at and think about art, it examines which artists and artworks appear most often in picture books and offers a survey of different kinds of art-related picture books: ones that claim to be purely informational, ones that make looking at art a game or a puzzle, ones in which children visit art museums, and many more. Since the books all include reproductions of or allusions to museum artworks, the study also considers the problems illustrators face in depicting museum artworks in illustrations in a different style.

Editor Vibiana Bowman has drawn together contributions from some of the leading scholars in the interdisciplinary field of children and childhood studies (CCS) in this guided approach to literature searching in CCS. The contributors to this book are both faculty currently teaching in the area of CCS and academic librarians. The charge given to each contributor was to write a chapter that explained the process of scholarly research in his or her own particular area of expertise to a student unfamiliar with that discipline. Towards this end, the book provides background information about interdisciplinary study in general, and children and childhood studies in particular, as well as an outline of basic research practices. Each contributor serves as a mentor and suggests a search strategy, discusses significant concepts and vocabulary, and lists the major resources that scholars in that area would be expected to use. Not intended as en exhaustive list of in-print research resources, rather the emphasis throughout this guide is on useful resources and effective research methodologies. As the field of CCS continues to evolve in the upcoming years, Scholarly Resources for Children and Childhood Studies will serve as an excellent stepping stone for those just entering the area.

This second, thoroughly updated edition of The Routledge International Handbook of Children, Adolescents, and Media analyzes a broad range of complementary areas of study, including children as media consumers, children as active participants in media making, and representations of children in the media. The roles that media play in the lives of children and adolescents, as well as their potential implications for their cognitive, emotional, social, and behavioral development, have attracted growing research attention in a variety of disciplines. This handbook presents a collection that spans a variety of disciplines including developmental psychology, media studies, public health, education, feminist studies, and the sociology of childhood. Chapters provide a unique intellectual mapping of current knowledge, exploring the relationship between children and media in local, national, and global contexts. Divided into five parts, each with an introduction explaining the themes and topics covered, the Handbook features over 50 contributions from leading and upcoming academics from around the globe. The revised and new chapters consider vital questions by analyzing texts, audience, and institutions, including: media and its effects on children’s mental health children and the internet of toys media and digital inequalities news and citizenship in the aftermath of COVID-19 The Handbook’s interdisciplinary approach and comprehensive, current, and international scope make it an authoritative, state-of-the-art guide to the field of children’s media studies. It will be indispensable for media scholars and professionals, policy makers, educators, and parents.

"A fascination with childhood unites the artist Louise Bourgeois (1911-2010) and the writers Samuel Beckett (1906-89) and Marcel Proust (1871-1922). But while many commentators have traced their childhood images back to memories of lived experiences, there is more to their mythologies of childhood that waits to be explored. They invite us to move away from familiar ideas - whether psychological or biographical - about what a child can represent, and even what a child is. The haunting child figures of Bourgeois, Beckett and Proust echo each other as they show how imagining origins- for a life, for a work of art - involves paradoxes that test the limits of our forms of expression. Art meets literature, profusion meets concision, French meets English, and images of childhood reveal new insights in this encounter between three great figures of twentieth- and twenty-first-century culture. Catherine Crimp holds a PhD from the University of Cambridge and is currently Lectrice d'anglais at theEcole Normale Superieure de Lyon."

This edited volume explores how success is conceptualized and represented in texts for young people in Asia. The essays in this collection examine how success for children relates to education, family, gender, race, class, community, and the nation. It answers the following questions: How is success for children represented in literature, cinema, and popular media? In what ways are these images grounded in the historical, political, and cultural contexts in which they are produced and consumed? How does childhood agency influence ideas about success in Asia? Highlighting the similarities and differences in how success is defined for children and young adults in Japan, South Korea, People’s Republic of China, Singapore, Taiwan, Indonesia, Vietnam, and India, this volume argues that success is an important keyword in the literary and cultural study of childhood in Asia.

Why do adults write about the child and why do they choose to depict children? This book looks at various examples from literature, art and film to analyze aspects of adults’ outlook on the child, and what it tells us about the adult. It pays special attention to the eye motif, as well as looking, watching and representing children. It outlines what might become an interesting topic of analysis for other studies, namely, the idea that the adult’s journey to self-actualization passes through writing for and about children. Rather than drawing major conclusions, the book opens venues for further thought on the topics treated. It also brings together works that might not have been compared or contrasted before, so that the reader can acquire a broader view of the threads that connect literature, art and film.

Shedding light on an important and neglected topic in childhood studies, Anja Müller interrogates how different concepts of childhood proliferated and were construed in eighteenth-century periodicals and satirical prints. In examining links between text and image, Müller uncovers the role these media played in the genealogy of childhood prior to the 1790s, challenging the myth that situates the origin of childhood in late eighteenth-century England.

The Art of Childhood and Adolescence is composed of completely new research on the development of representational thinking from infancy through to adolescence. It makes an important contribution to the theory of children's development and to practitioners' understanding, as well as suggesting new paths of inquiry. The book draws on highly detailed longitudinal studies, conducted over 24 years (20 in London and 4 in Singapore). Line drawings and photographs are used to illustrate important concepts. Matthews, highly respected internationally, also sheds light on current debates, such as the opposition of culturally specific and universal development in children the world over.

The speed of technological development, from cell phones to artificial intelligence, opens up exciting new opportunities for promoting human flourishing. It also raises grave risks, threatening not only personal privacy and dignity but also our collective survival. Technologies of Human Rights Representation brings together three fields of research critical to securing our future: changing technologies, human rights, and representation. For each of these fields, this book asks key questions: How can we open the black box of technological advances so that we can more fully understand their effects upon our lives? What can we do to make sure that these effects align with the values of human rights? And how does the way we talk about technology and rights—from military reports and corporate marketing to human rights reports and poetry—amplify or diminish our capacity both to understand and to control what happens next? Contributors from anthropology, communications, criminology, global studies, law, literary and cultural studies, and women and gender studies bring diverse methodological approaches to these crucial questions.