Introduction : agency, activism, and citizenship in children’s and young adult literature and culture

Abstract

This book discusses children’s and young adult agency and activism across literature and culture, demonstrating how they influence child citizenship. It engages with agentic voices and practices across multiple spheres of young people’s lives, as well as the challenges to active citizenship faced by children. The collection establishes both agency and citizenship to be relational. We consider agency as a system of relations between children themselves, between children and adults, children and institutions, children and nation-states, as well as children and the nonhuman. We discuss citizenship as an entanglement, a process of becoming rather than an awarded status experienced passively. Across the essays included in Child as Citizen, we review the interconnectedness that emerges from these relationships and attempt to untangle some of the complications. How can we truly position children as cocreators within institutions and systems that do not share our values? How do we balance individual and collective agency? How can citizenship become a vehicle for care-full activism rather than a passive status? To respond, we adopt an interdisciplinary approach, drawing on the sociology of childhood, children’s literature studies, youth culture studies, media, technology and cultural studies, and Anthropocene, ecofeminist, and disability studies. Brought together into a single volume, we hope that these essays become a point of reference in establishing how children’s and young adult texts bring their readers closer to embodied participation in political processes of positive change toward social justice.