Journal of Childhood Studies

Aims & Scope

Journal of Childhood Studies is a peer reviewed, open access digital journal that sustains and advances urgent conversations about the ethical, political, systemic, conceptual, material, and relational conditions that shape - and refigure - the complex and ever-changing terrain of childhood and childhood studies. Publishing contributions from researchers and practitioners, Journal of Childhood Studies advances the collective work of studying, responding to, and re-inventing neoliberal and neocolonial childhoods. Articles published in JCS resist the dominant Euro-Western logics that constrain prevailing conceptualizations of childhood and locate childhood within and against the powerful structures that govern everyday life (ex. citizenship, capitalism, oppression, climate crisis, ongoing settler colonialism). Importantly, JCS invites manuscripts that actively engage with refusal, speculation, invention, relations, and local knowledges - and other generative and transformative methods - to offer proposals and possibilities for sustaining and co-creating more just and equitable childhoods. Journal of Childhood Studies takes seriously its role as a scholarly journal in both international and Canadian childhood studies, and works to be accountable to (and interrupt) the power dynamics, discernment, and exclusions that often thread through taken-for-granted academic publishing pathways. Accordingly, JCS publishes diverse manuscripts, including pieces that purposefully stand outside the well-established theoretical, content, and methodological boundaries and conceptions of expertise (ex. career level, theorist vs. practitioner) that have long influenced conventional scholarly publishing. Acknowledging the lived knowledge that children hold and the histories of extractive research on children, JCS requires that all submissions that directly engage with children (ex. children as participants, research with educators in a classroom of children) clearly address the ethics and politics of integrating children’s perspectives and realities into scholarly research. In Canada, this is consistent with an emerging push to center young people’s role in research processes ( please see the Canadian Journal of Public Health’s statement ). JCS works at opening space for alternative, critical, or contradictory engagements with children and childhoods by encouraging submissions from practitioners, students, early career academics, and established scholars worldwide. We utilize distinct review processes to provide specific support for authors who submit their work to particular sections of the Journal. JCS encourages submissions from those who study across disciplines connected to childhood (including, but not limited to, education, pedagogy, geography, ecology, policy, activism, history, and media) and who foreground the political and situated character of studying childhood (including, but not limited to, Black studies, Indigenous studies, Global South knowledges, DisCrit, anti- and post-colonialism, feminist perspectives, queer studies, postdevelopmentalism, and countering anthropocentrism). JCS accepts research articles, conceptual work, multimedia essays, discussions of emerging ideas, and practice-oriented contributions that bring an innovative edge to their engagements with childhood. JCS publishes guest-edited special issues that foreground timely issues, questions, or proposals consistent with the Journal’s Focus, Scope, and Content Guidelines.

Based on the Think.Check.Submit framework by DOAJ, COPE & OASPA. All data from verified open sources.

Subject Classification