Year: 2019
Type: book-chapter
Abstract: In the latter decades of the 20 th Century childhood began to be reconceptualized in the academy, public life, and institutions of welfare.A new era of scholars pushed against previous determinations of children and youth as defined predominantly by innocence, vulnerability, and dependence, instead advocating new imaginings where children are active and meaningful contributors to worlds (Alanen 1988;Corsaro 1997;James, Jenks, and Prout 1998;Qvortrup 1994).Agency is a defining feature of this "new" social studies of childhood, whereby children are constructed as agentic beings in their own right, rather than just in training for the adults they will become.While agency is a much-utilized concept in the broad interrogation of its theoretical definition and subsequent applications, in relation to children and childhood, agency is less well-attended to (Clark and Castro 2019).While agency as a term is regularly deployed in Childhood Studies, it remains, with notable exceptions (see, for example, Alanen 2010; Castro 2017, 2019; Clark and Richards 2017; Esser 2016; Gallacher and Gallagher 2008; Oswell 2013; Tisdall and Punch 2012), enshrined in neoliberal models of individualism and Enlightenment notions of the human.The present essay collection responds to this gap by placing agency as the central analytic foundation when conceptualizing, theorizing, and discussing representations of children and childhood in science fiction (SF).SF is an imaginative genre with enormous potential -it can expand our understandings of life and posit new beings and worlds that often give us pause.In fact, SF is "linked to new ways of seeing, new ways of believing, or even new ways of knowing" (Castro 2018, 253).Inevitably, we realize the future (or alternate past/present) in SF is not so much more different than when, what, or where we live in now, but so much more real in the
Authors: Jessica Clark, Ingrid E. Castro
Language: English
Subfield: Literature and Literary Theory
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2990934410