New Directions

The year 2017 has brought some significant changes to Jeunesse. In addition to hiring a new managing editor, Lauren Bosc, and a new copy editor, Claire Wilkshire, we have moved the preceding managing editor, Larissa Wodtke, to a position on the editorial board and welcomed four new editors: Sally Campbell Galman, Associate Professor in the Department of Teacher Education and Curriculum Studies at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst in the United States; children’s and Victorian literature scholar Jennifer Harrison, who teaches at East Stroudsburg University in Pennsylvania, US; Haifeng Hui, Associate Professor in the School of Foreign Languages at Huazhong University of Science and Technology in Wuhan, China; and Jo Lampert, Professor of Education at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia. These new editors have not only enriched an already vibrant culture at Jeunesse but have also added to our expertise, further enabling us to work with authors from various disciplines and aiding in editing submissions from those parts of the world previously not represented on the board. While in the past our board has been dominated by Canadian scholars working in English departments and—more recently—by one scholar outside Canada working in the social sciences, we can now proclaim much greater interdisciplinarity and geographical diversity. This shift has happened gradually and with great care on the part of Jeunesse’s editors. Having begun as an academic, peer-reviewed journal working within a bilingual national frame—Canadian Children’s Literature (CCL)/Littérature canadienne pour la jeunesse (LCJ)—Jeunesse has moved to an international and interdisciplinary scope, a transition that was neither something that could happen overnight nor something we wanted to force prematurely. Rather, the development of Jeunesse as a journal fundamentally different from its predecessor has proceeded in a way that seems natural in terms of the submissions we have been receiving since 2008 and the changing makeup of our editorial board. It took some time before scholars working outside English departments felt comfortable considering Jeunesse as a venue for their work, and it has taken time to amass the expertise required to edit international and interdisciplinary submissions. As these have gradually expanded to include disciplines and fields that it had not been possible to publish under the umbrella of a national, predominantly Anglophone journal, and as editors with varying backgrounds and specializations have come and gone over the last nine years, Jeunesse has undergone a succession of small changes. Taken together, these changes represent a major transformation. It is our hope that we will continue to receive both interdisciplinary submissions and submissions from a range of disciplines and national contexts that explore topics, themes, and texts pertinent to young people.

This last Jeunesse issue of 2017 also marks a collaboration with the Association for Research in Cultures of Young People (ARCYP), which hosted a conference in October 2016 entitled Youngsters: On the Cultures of Children and Youth (Youngsters 2016). The conference, which attracted a wide range of artists, activists, international scholars, and professionals working within the humanities and social sciences, convened at Simon Fraser University’s downtown Harbour Centre campus in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. Rarely have I seen so many different disciplines represented at a conference. That such a wide range of approaches emerged at a conference run by a small, albeit growing, association is even more remarkable. Youngsters 2016 exemplifies the ongoing work of consolidating research on young people’s texts and cultures to clear a space for inter- and cross-disciplinary dialogue and research collaborations. Reflecting the diversity of the participants, some of the papers presented at Youngsters 2016 were interdisciplinary productions in and of themselves. The opportunity to witness collaboration among scholars from different discursive realms and, in some cases, different countries, was, at least for me, a refreshing change from those conferences that express a desire for interdisciplinarity and transnationalism but for some reason or another could not achieve it in practice. In the second editorial of this issue, outgoing ARCYP President Stuart Poyntz and incoming ARCYP President Naomi Hamer reflect on this landmark conference and introduce the three articles that came out of it and that are now included in this issue...