Children’s drawings and the meaning of nation: a study of visual images

This paper uses children's drawings to explore how they depict their nation's identity. The artists are children between the ages of nine and twelve. They reside in two countries, the United States and Poland. The drawings were collected at three times, 1990, 2018, and 2022, allowing for both cross national and cross temporal comparison. Theoretical definitions of nation are employed to anticipate how children are likely to visually represent their own country and that of another. The findings, based on a collection of more than six hundred pictures, show both conformity to and deviation from theoretical definitions.