Children's and Young Adult Literature Commons^™

Decolonizing Children's Literature: Diversity & Representation In Six Scholarly Journals, Camryn Carwll, Kathleen Fricke, Shannon Montgomery, Shannon Solley, Samantha Walsh, Gabrielle Halko

English Student Work

Research on children's publishing shows that children's literature remains an overwhelmingly White, cisgender, heterosexual, and abled field. The same can be said about the scholarship of children's literature, but little research has been done to measure representation and diversity within the discipline. Our collaborative research team (five undergraduate research assistants and one faculty member) analyzes data from six children's literature journals over a 10-year period; using criteria from Lee & Low's Diversity Baseline Survey and the Cooperative Children's Book Center at UW-Madison, we measure how much of the published scholarship in recent children's literature journals can be considered "diverse." Finally, …