Child and Youth Agency in Science Fiction: Travel, Technology, Time intersects considerations about children’s and youth’s agency with the popular culture genre of science fiction. As scholars in childhood studies and beyond seek to expand understandings of agency in children’s lives, this collection places science fiction at the heart of this endeavor. Retellings of the past, narratives of the present, and new landscapes of the future, each explored in science fiction, allow for creative reimaginings of the capabilities, movements, and agency of youth. Core themes of generation, embodiment, family, identity, belonging, gender, and friendship traverse across the chapters and inform the contributors’ readings of various film, literature, television, and virtual media sources. Here, children and youth are heterogeneous, and agency as a central analytical concept is interrogated through interdisciplinary, intersectional, intergenerational, and posthuman analyses. The contributors argue that there is vast power in science fiction representations of children’s agency to challenge accepted notions of neoliberal agency, enhance understandings of agency in childhood studies, and further contextualize agency in the lives, voices, and cultures of youth.

Representing Agency in Popular Culture: Children and Youth on Page, Screen and In-Between addresses the intersection of children’s and youth’s agency and popular culture. As scholars in childhood studies and beyond seek to expand understandings of agency, power, and voice in children’s lives, this book places popular culture and representation as central to this endeavor. Core themes of family, gender, temporality, politics, education, technology, disability, conflict, identity, ethnicity, and friendship traverse across the chapters, framed through various film, television, literature, and virtual media sources. Here, childhood is considered far from homogeneous and the dominance of neoliberal models of agency is questioned by intersectional and intergenerational analyses. This book posits there is vast power in popular culture representations of children’s agency, and interrogation of these themes through interdisciplinary lenses is vital to furthering knowledge and understanding about children’s lives and within childhood studies.

This unique and timely collection examines childhood and the child character throughout Stephen King’s works, from his early novels and short stories, through film adaptations, to his most recent publications. King’s use of child characters within the framework of horror (or of horrific childhood) raises questions about adult expectations of children, childhood, the American family, child agency, and the nature of fear and terror for (or by) children. The ways in which King presents, complicates, challenges, or terrorizes children and notions of childhood provide a unique lens through which to examine American culture, including both adult and social anxieties about children and childhood across the decades of King’s works.

Joining the emergent interdisciplinary investment in bridging the social sciences and the humanities, Childhood, Agency, and Fantasy: Walking in Other Worlds explores linkages between children’s agency and fantasy. Fantasy as an integral aspect of childhood and as a genre allows for children’s spectacular dreams and hopeful realities. Friendship, family, identity, loyalty, belongingness, citizenry, and emotionality are central concepts explored in chapters that are anchored by humanities texts of television, film, and literature, but also by social science qualitative methods of participant observation and interviews. Fantasy has the capacity to be a revolutionary change agent that in its modernity can creatively reflect, critique, or reimagine the social, political, and cultural norms of our world. Such promise is also found to be true of children’s agency, wherein children’s beings and becomings, rooted in childhood’s freedoms and constraints, result in a range of outcomes. In the endeavor to broaden theory and research on children’s agency, fantasy becomes a point of possibility with its expanding subjectivities, far-reaching terrain, and spirit of adventure.

Agency and Participation in Childhood and Youth presents new critical engagement in conceptualising the roles of youth agency and participation in education, development and the pursuit of social justice. Theoretically, the book is framed within the paradigm of the capability approach, initially developed by Nobel Laureate, Amartya Sen, and further differentiated by others, including philosopher, Martha Nussbaum. The book unravels the complex relationships between the nature of youth agency and participation, in education, but also in wider political, economic and social arenas, and the potential of young people to expand their freedoms to lead lives they have reason to value. It is thus argued that ethical, sustainable development is contingent on the nature of youth agency and participation in schooling and further afield. Bringing together leading international experts researching children's capabilities, Agency and Participation in Childhood and Youth offers a unique exploration of links between exciting new areas of development in theory, research and practical applications of Sen and Nussbaum's ideas. The book addresses a significant gap in the literature drawing on empirical data from the UK, the USA, Jordan, Palestine, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Switzerland, New Zealand and beyond, with perspectives presented from both within and outside schools and other formal educational settings. Agency and Participation in Childhood and Youth is of particular interest to academics, teaching professionals, undergraduate and postgraduate students of education studies, social policy, youth and development studies.

History is constantly evolving, and the history of children’s literature is no exception. Since the original publication of Emer O’Sullivan’s Historical Dictionary of Children’s Literature in 2010, much has happened in the field of children’s literature. New authors have come into print, new books have won awards, and new ideas have entered the discourse within children’s literature studies. Historical Dictionary of Children's Literature, Second Edition contains a chronology, an introduction, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has more than 700 cross-referenced entries. This book will be an excellent resource for students, scholars, researchers, and anyone interested in the field of children’s literature studies.

One morning Achilles, a young crocodile, insists that he will eat a child that day and refuses all other food, but when he actually finds a little girl, she puts him in his place.

The first book-length critical reception of Barrie Thorne’s classic book, Gender Play Barrie Thorne’s Gender Play was a landmark study of the social worlds of primary school children that sparked a paradigm shift in our understanding of how kids and the adults around them contest and reinforce gender boundaries. Thirty years later, Gender Replay celebrates and reflects on this classic, extending Thorne’s scholarship into a new and different generation. Freeden Blume Oeur and C. J. Pascoe’s new volume brings together many of the foremost scholars on youth from an array of disciplines, including sociology, childhood studies, education, gender studies, and communication studies. Together, these scholars reflect on many contemporary issues that were not covered in Thorne’s original text, exploring new dimensions of schooling, the sociology of gender, social media, and feminist theory. Over fourteen essays, the authors touch on topics such as youth resistance in the Trump era; girls and technology; the use of play to challenge oppressive racial regimes; youth activism against climate change; the importance of taking kids seriously as social actors; and mentoring as a form of feminist praxis. Gender Replay picks up where Thorne’s text left off, doing the vital work of applying her teachings to a transformed world and to new configurations of childhood.

This collection examines the child’s role in contemporary post-apocalyptic films and television.. By exploring the function of child characters within a dystopian framework, this volume illustrates how traditional notions of childhood are tethered to sites of adult conflict and disaster, a connection that often works to reaffirm the “rightness” of past systems of social order.