Child as Citizen: Agency and Activism in Children’s Literature and Culture

Contributions by Daniela Brockdorff, Nina Christensen, Jill Coste, Katrin Dautel, Justyna Deszcz-Tryhubczak, Giuliana Fenech, Naomi Hamer, Irena Barbara Kalla, Anne Klomberg, Sonali Kulkarni, Elizabeth Leach-Leung, Ann Marie Murnaghan, Emily Murphy, Emilie Owens, Nicola Parker, Patrycja Poniatowska, Meg Rosoff, and Farriba Schulz

Child as Citizen: Agency and Activism in Children’s Literature and Culture addresses children’s and young adult agency and activism across literature and culture, demonstrating how these forces influence child citizenship. Contributors to this volume highlight the agentic voices and activist practices that are growing across all spheres of young people’s lives, as well as the challenges to active citizenship that children growing up in unjust sociopolitical contexts face. The volume is interdisciplinary and draws on the sociology of childhood, children’s literature studies, youth culture studies, media, technology, and cultural studies, and Anthropocene, ecofeminist, and disability studies.

Agency occurs in and around literature and storytelling, and this collection establishes how it is always influenced by identity as well as geopolitics; how it is both subjective and collective; how it is cultural and embodied; and how, like citizenship, it is not a static status but rather an ongoing negotiation. In this collection, contributors invite readers to consider agency as a system of relations between children themselves, between children and adults, children and institutions, and children and nation-states, as well as between children and the nonhuman. This book reviews the interconnectedness between these relationships and attempts to untangle some of the complications that emerge.

Giuliana Fenech is Senior Lecturer in the Department of English at University of Malta, specializing in work involving children’s and young adult literature and citizenship, agency, creative protest, and activism. She is currently the principal investigator of an Erasmus K2 HED project called Seen and Heard: Young Adult Voices and Freedom of Expression. Additionally, Fenech runs a storytelling organization, Lignin Stories, which works with diverse groups of children and youth in Malta and across Europe.