This book explores the intersections between children, childhood, youth and the future and provides critical understandings of how the future is imagined, conceptualised, enlisted, used, negotiated and manipulated to serve diverse political ends and social imaginaries.
This book explores the intersections between children, childhood, youth and the future and provides critical understandings of how the future is imagined, conceptualised, enlisted, used, negotiated and manipulated to serve diverse political ends and social imaginaries.
It foregrounds the value and utility of the notion of the future as it manifests in the daily lives of children and young people, as well as conceptually in the scholarly discussions and debates which are currently unfolding around this concept and the temporalities of childhood and youth. It enriches understandings of how children and youth imagine, create, and enact their futures and of the ways in which their futures and presents are mutually constituted and intertwined. Going beyond simplistic and stereotypical identifications of children and young people with the future, this edited book presents empirical and theoretical discussions of childhood/youth and the future with a view to offering a deeper and more nuanced understanding of these intersections.
The book will be of much interest to students of Anthropology, Sociology, Geography, Childhood Studies, and Youth Studies.
Children, Young People, and the Future: A Critical Introduction, Spyros
Spyrou, Matthew C. Benwell, and Eleni Theodorou Section I: Temporalising the
Future
1. Your Future Self Will Thank You!: Creating Future Childhood
Memories in Time-Capsule Activity Books for Children, Clémentine Beauvais
2.
Futures Already Here: Fractal Thinking for Childhood Studies, Camila da Rosa
Ribeiro and Zsuzsa Millei
3. The Temporalities of Indigenous Childhoods:
Timelessness and Worldmaking in Indigenous Contexts, Nicole Ineese-Nash and
Kaitlyn Wilcox
4. Development, Schooling, and Young Peoples Navigation of
Non-linear Futures, Tatek Abebe
5. Hopeful futures? Divergent futurities of
disadvantaged Brazilian children and youth, Lucia Rabello de Castro, Felipe
Salvador Grisolia, and Sabrina Dal Ongaro Savegnago Section II: Living
Uncertain Futures
6. Envisioning and Creating Futures Growing up on the
Streets of African Cities, Wayne Shand, Lorraine van Blerk, and Janine Hunter
7. Temporality and Childhood in Displacement: Unaccompanied Asylum-seeking
Children in Greece Waiting for their Futures, Eugenia Katartzi
8. Out of
Place, Into the Future: Refugee Families Experiences of Displacement and
Future Aspirations, Bree Akesson, Karen Frensch, and Sohaila Isaqzai
9. Rule
by Future Value: Maternal Labours and the Human-for-Capital Child, Maria
Kromidas Section III: Imagining Alternative Futures
10. Education for
Sustainable Development?, Aoife Crummy
11. [ T]he future is made of our
present actions: Young Climate Activists Rhetorical Construction of
Futures, Rachel Conrad
12. Dystopic Surveillance and Surveilled Dystopias:
Young Peoples Visions of Anticipated Futures, Spyros Spyrou and Eleni
Theodorou
13. Interrogating the Speculative Futures of Children and
Technology, Liam Berriman
14. Queering the Future: Narratives of LGBTQ+ Youth
in Contemporary Urban India, Utsa Mukherjee
Matthew C. Benwell is Reader of Human Geography at Newcastle University, UK. He is co-editor of Children, Young People and Critical Geopolitics, Refugee Youth: Migration, Justice and Urban Space and was co-editor of the journal Childrens Geographies.
Spyros Spyrou is Professor of Anthropology at European University Cyprus. He is the author of Disclosing Childhoods: Research and Knowledge Production for a Critical Childhood Studies and co-editor of Reimagining Childhood Studies, Children and Borders and Valuing the Past, Sustaining the Future? Exploring Coastal Societies, Childhood(s) and Local Knowledge in Times of Global Transition.
Eleni Theodorou is Associate Professor in Social Foundations of Education at European University Cyprus. Her work is situated in childhood studies as well as in the fields of sociology and anthropology of education.
