Childhood

In the context of global concerns about plastics, this paper sets out and exemplifies a research agenda for articulating children’s encounters with plastics. The paper analyses data co-produced with 11–15 year-olds through interviews, app-based research and experimental/arts-led workshops. It moves beyond scholarship in health and environmental sciences, and in environmental education research, to outline a far richer range of ways to conceptualise children’s encounters with plastics, based in children’s everyday, embodied and emotive interactions with plastics.

When youth agency and climate change are understood in the context of Politics, they do not reflect young people’s everyday realities and their youthful engagement with climate change. Building on the performative understanding of citizenship, in this theoretical piece, I suggest a broader framing of youthful political agency and participation in the context of climate change and consumerism by referring to four basic lived political positionings: ‘victim’, ‘voter’, ‘rejecter’ and ‘interpreter’. I further argue that young people perform their interpretive agency by adopting everyday activism and green lifestyles while challenging adult-led conceptualisations of environmental ideologies.

To “make kin, not babies” is what Donna Haraway has recently proposed in response to the so-called “Anthropocene”. Building on other critical engagements with Haraway’s proposal, this paper interrogates it from a childist perspective. While striving towards a “pro-child” position on kinship, Haraway only goes so far in explicating this aim. The paper suggests that challenging adultism as well as attention to children's ongoing kinship practices are required.

This article draws on child activists’ experiences in Bangladesh and Ghana, who mobilised to stop potential child marriages from their respective Child Forums and Children’s Parliaments. Case studies were undertaken with 75 child activists, 10 girls whose child marriages had been stopped, and 22 adult stakeholders. The children’s activism disrupted intergenerational relations – unsettling adults’ attitudes towards children – and depended on such relations – children were successful in stopping child marriages because they drew on critical social capital and mobilised key stakeholders. Children’s activism thus has lessons for children’s participation literature more generally, in the synergies between children’s mobilisation and intergenerational relations.

Spain is one of the European countries most affected of COVID-19, and also the one with the most stringent restrictions for children. This study aims to explore how COVID-19 lockdown affects children by analysing 151 drawings from children in lockdown. Findings were represented in four main categories: (1) Activities; (2) Emotions; (3) Socialization; and (4) Academic. The results indicate the need to manage the lockdown situation taking into account also children’s voices and by placing greater emphasis on social and inclusive policies to help alleviate the possible effects of the pandemic and the lockdown on them.

This paper deals with the unpredictable outbreak of the pandemic, explaining its impact on the education system, and with structural flexibility as a way to face unpredictability, based on the generalisability and coordination of manifestations of agency. The pandemic has enhanced a narrative of the child as a medium of learning, which undermines children’s agency. The example of the research project CHILD-UP (Children Hybrid Integration: Learning Dialogue as a way of Upgrading policies of Participation) is used to show how children’s agency and structural flexibility in classroom interactions can be supported and analysed.

Friendship and romance are two popular topics amongst children. In children’s romantic adventures, same-gender intimate friends always play a significant role. Since romance in childhood is constructed as an inappropriate topic in the Chinese schooling context, there is a limited number of studies that can offer an in-depth understanding of Chinese children’s experiences of same-gender intimate friendships and romantic adventures at school. This article aims to close this gap by using ethnographic data collected in a rural primary boarding school in China to present how Chinese girls’ same-gender intimate friendships and their romantic adventures interweave together.

Based on ethnographic fieldwork, we explore how boys use jocular play to perform romantic relationships in their peer culture and construction of masculinities. The analysis combines an ethnomethodological approach to doing gender with poststructuralist-influenced studies on masculinity and boyhood. We demonstrate how the boys – through game-playing, teasing, humorous narration, and ritual insults – do gender while they explore potentially embarrassing romantic experiences. The boys police and produce acceptable heterosexual masculinities while having fun and doing friendship, demonstrating the dynamic and entertaining potentials of performing romantic relationships in jocular peer play.

Our study with 71 children aged 6-14 living in New Zealand and Samoa, provides a new child-centred perspective on transnational diasporic families. We use the Pacific concept vā to frame the study, in which children’s transnational-kinship connections reflect relational rather than physical approaches to space. Familial habitus surpasses spatial habitus as children’s primary reference point. For diasporic children, family keeps alive their sense of Pacific Island belonging. Transnational kinship ties give Pacific children additional resilience in adapting to unknown futures.

This article examines employability discourse within school uniform policies as a way to justify uniform. The uniform policy of every publicly funded secondary school in Scotland (n = 357) was studied using content and discourse analysis. Employability discourse was grouped into three themes: School as preparation for work; school to replicate a work environment; and young people creating a good impression for employers. The rationale of the uniform is revealed as a technology through which the employer’s gaze is projected onto pupils.