Abstract
In research on social movements, children have so far rarely been taken into consideration and included in theoretical concepts. Diane Rodgers’ study aims to draw attention to the broad and diverse participation of children in various social movements. It covers a period of about 100 years and includes examples from almost all parts of the world. The author draws on written and photographic documents, including children’s own testimonies, biographical memories and case studies by other authors. Wherever possible, she tries to make the children’s perspectives visible in their own words.
The presentation is based on a theoretical typology that the author had developed 15 years earlier in an essay that was widely regarded at the time. She distinguishes three forms of children’s participation in social movements: as strategic participants, participants by default and active participants. Understood in an ideal-typical way, this typology forms the foil for the structure of the book.
Chapter 1 presents an overview of the interdisciplinary literature on children and agency, children’s civic participation, the children’s rights movement and the field of childhood studies. Chapter 2 begins with the first category of the typology, children as strategic participants. This term refers to the ways that adults resort to children in the movements they carry out in order to use them as symbols for various goals. They usually present them as a vivid image of exploited innocence in order to trigger righteous indignation or sympathy among the public and thus advance the goals of their movement. Chapter 3 looks at a less perceived and researched type of children’s participation, which the author calls by default. Children are brought to protests or meetings without any political intention by the adults. In Chapter 4, the author presents a variety of examples where children are independent actors in social movements. She refers, among others, to the movements of working children against exploitation and for the right to work with dignity, school student movements and school strikes against authoritarian education, movements against racism, police violence, wars or military occupation, for stricter laws on the individual use of weapons, environmental and climate movements or activism in the new digital media. In Chapter 5, the author discusses the ways in which the typology of children’s participation she has created can change theories and concepts about social movements. With the examples from different times and countries, she questions the current lack of analyses on children in the literature on social movements. In the concluding Chapter 6, the author makes suggestions for further studies on children as participants in social movements.
Previous research on social movements has only addressed children’s participation in descriptive and incidental ways, if at all. The book contributes to a theoretically better grounded understanding of children’s forms of action. It thus also makes an important contribution to interdisciplinary research on childhoods and children’s rights by taking us beyond previous concepts of participation and making visible and re-conceptualizing the various forms of children’s agency and participation.
The book helps to understand that there is something artificial about the formal separation between social movements of adults and those of children. The fact that children also have their own movements and often bring them into being themselves reflects the fact that childhood in contemporary western societies has to do with a specific, largely subordinate social status that goes hand in hand with institutional separation from the adult world. Therefore, autonomous movements of children move in a dichotomy: on the one hand, they represent nolens volens the bourgeois ideology of childhood, which is based on and solidifies the separation of children and adults; on the other hand, children in the divided society have no choice but to organize themselves as children.
Diane Rodgers’ study makes it clear that they never do this only in their role as children and that the children’s movements that see themselves as autonomous are not about generational conflicts or a struggle between children and adults. It would be interesting to discuss the question of the extent to which children themselves act as protagonists vis-a-vis adults and suggest to them that they arrive at new perspectives on social and political challenges. The climate movement Fridays for Future is a recent example of this. Future studies could make clear what it means for adults to be in solidarity with children and for children to meet each other not as adversaries but as allies. The tense relationship between children and adults or between young and old generations will not be overcome seamlessly, but it can become visible that the generational asymmetry often invoked in childhood studies is not a natural phenomenon but a socially produced one.