Producing Children
Critical Studies in Childhood Creativity

Peter C. Kunze (Edited by), Victoria Ford Smith (Edited by), Katharine Slater (Contributions by), Rachel Conrad (Contributions by), Brianna Anderson (Contributions by), Brigitte Fielder (Contributions by), Maggie E. Morris Davis (Contributions by), Cristina Rhodes (Contributions by), Peter C. Kunze (Contributions by), Ivy Linton Stabell (Contributions by), Victoria Ford Smith (Contributions by), Marah Gubar (Contributions by), Trevor Boffone (Contributions by)

9781978842328

Hardback, published 15 April 2025

226 pages, 22 B-W images
23.5 x 15.6 x 2 cm, 0.454 kg

"A welcome and eye-opening collection of richly contextualized, multidisciplinary studies that push us to think more seriously about children as cultural producers. This timely anthology moves forward in exciting ways important conversations about children's cultural agency, creativity, and collaborations with adults." - Mary Celeste Kearney (author of Girls Make Media) "Producing Children brings together rich, interdisciplinary perspectives to offer fresh insight on children's role in cultural production. The case studies explored in this collection reinforce the urgency of centering children's voices, experiences, and agency in how we understand the definitions and operations of culture." - Ashleigh Greene Wade (author of Black Girl Autopoetics: Agency in Everyday Digital Practice)

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.

Introduction 
PETER C. KUNZE AND VICTORIA FORD SMITH