Past tensions and future possibilities: ARCYP and children’s media studies

The year 2007 marked the beginning. The same year JOCAM was launched, an interdisciplinary group of Canadian scholars formed a scholarly association to address the needs of researchers working with young people’s texts and cultures across Canada. In this paper, three members of Association for Research in Cultures of Young People’s (ARCYP’s) Executive examine current and future tensions within children’s media studies by drawing on lessons from ARCYP’s opening decade. Both ARCYP and JOCAM emerged during a time of productive intersections between the fields of children’s studies and media studies. Here, we draw on ARCYP’s history as part of an examination of ongoing lacunae that have arisen as sites of common concern have emerged. These tensions—having to do with notions of textuality and authority, consumption and children’s agency and citizenship and power—point to lacunae in the field of children’s media studies. ARCYP’s history of development is thus taken up as a lens to see the past and imagine the future priorities of our research field.