1st Edition

Children, Young People and the Future

Edited By Matthew C. Benwell, Spyros Spyrou, Eleni Theodorou Copyright 2027
248 Pages 5 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

248 Pages 5 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

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... Read more

Children, Young People, and the Future: A Critical IntroductionSpyros 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 People’s 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 People’s 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

Biography

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 Children’s 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 of 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.