Joining the emergent interdisciplinary investment in bridging the social sciences and the humanities, Childhood, Agency, and Fantasy: Walking in Other Worlds explores linkages between children’s agency and fantasy. Fantasy as an integral aspect of childhood and as a genre allows for children’s spectacular dreams and hopeful realities. Friendship, family, identity, loyalty, belongingness, citizenry, and emotionality are central concepts explored in chapters that are anchored by humanities texts of television, film, and literature, but also by social science qualitative methods of participant observation and interviews. Fantasy has the capacity to be a revolutionary change agent that in its modernity can creatively reflect, critique, or reimagine the social, political, and cultural norms of our world. Such promise is also found to be true of children’s agency, wherein children’s beings and becomings, rooted in childhood’s freedoms and constraints, result in a range of outcomes. In the endeavor to broaden theory and research on children’s agency, fantasy becomes a point of possibility with its expanding subjectivities, far-reaching terrain, and spirit of adventure.

Childhood, Agency, and Fantasy: Walking in Other Worlds draws on childhood studies scholarship to contextualize children's agentic entanglements with fantasy. Fantasy offers children opportunities for greater peer connectivity, identity exploration, holistic citizenry, and creative empowerment.

This Handbook explores the multidisciplinary field of childhood studies through a uniquely global lens. It focuses on enquiries and investigations into the everyday lives of young children in the age range of birth to 8 years of age, giving space to their voices and involving interrogations about the various aspect of their lives. This Handbook engages with the interdisciplinary field of childhood studies, education, cultural studies, ethnography, and philosophy, with contributions from scholars from across the globe who have focused their work on the complexities of childhoods in contemporary times. By considering a range of epistemologies, ontologies and perspectives to present the contemporary & systematic research on the topic from a wide range of academics and authors in the field, this Handbook provides a significant contribution to the international dialogue of Global Childhoods. Part 1: Global Childhoods Part 2: Researching Global Childhoods Part 3: Contemporary Childhoods Part 4: Pedagogies and Practice Part 5: Creating Communities for Global Children

This collection examines the child’s role in contemporary post-apocalyptic films and television.. By exploring the function of child characters within a dystopian framework, this volume illustrates how traditional notions of childhood are tethered to sites of adult conflict and disaster, a connection that often works to reaffirm the “rightness” of past systems of social order.

Childhood in Animation: Navigating a Secret World explores how children are viewed in animated cinema and television and examines the screen spaces that they occupy. The image of the child is often a site of conflict, one that has been captured, preserved, and recollected on screen; but what do these representations tell us about the animated child and how do they compare to their real counterparts? Is childhood simply a metaphor for innocence, or something far more complex that encompasses agency, performance, and othering? Childhood in Animation focuses on key screen characters, such as DJ, Norman, Lilo, the Lost Boys, Marji, Parvana, Bluey, Kirikou, Robyn, Mebh, Cartman and Bart, amongst others, to see how they are represented within worlds of fantasy, separation, horror, politics, and satire, as well as viewing childhood itself through a philosophical, sociological, and global lens. Ultimately, this book navigates the rabbit hole of the ‘elsewhere’ to reveal the secret space of childhood, where anything (and everything) is possible. This volume will be of great interest to scholars and students of animation, childhood studies, film and television studies, and psychology and sociology.

The essays in this collection address the relationship between children and cultural memory in texts both for and about young people. The collection overall is concerned with how cultural memory is shaped, contested, forgotten, recovered, and (re)circulated, sometimes in opposition to dominant national narratives, and often for the benefit of young readers who are assumed not to possess any prior cultural memory. From the innovative development of school libraries in the 1920s to the role of utopianism in fixing cultural memory for teen readers, it provides a critical look into children and ideologies of childhood as they are represented in a broad spectrum of texts, including film, poetry, literature, and architecture from Canada, the United States, Japan, Germany, Britain, India, and Spain. These cultural forms collaborate to shape ideas and values, in turn contributing to dominant discourses about national and global citizenship. The essays included in the collection imply that childhood is an oft-imagined idealist construction based in large part on participation, identity, and perception; childhood is invisible and tangible, exciting and intriguing, and at times elusive even as cultural and literary artifacts recreate it. Children and Cultural Memory in Texts of Childhood is a valuable resource for scholars of children’s literature and culture, readers interested in childhood and ideology, and those working in the fields of diaspora and postcolonial studies.

Over the last few decades, public opinion has been traumatised by revelations of child abuse on a mass scale. It has become the major human rights story of the 21st century in Western society. This ground-breaking book explores the relationship between the media, child abuse and shifting adult–child power relations which, in Western countries, has spawned an ever-expanding range of laws, policies and procedures introduced to address the ‘explosion’ of interest in the issue of child abuse. Allegations of child sexual abuse by Roman Catholic clergy in Ireland – and its ‘cover-up’ by Church authorities – have given rise to one of the greatest institutional scandals of modern history. Through in-depth analysis of 20 years of media representation of the issue, the book draws significant insights on the media’s influence and its impact on civil society. Highly topical and of interest and relevance to lecturers and researchers in the areas of childhood studies, sociology of childhood, child protection and social work, social and public policy and human rights, as well as policymakers, this book provides an important contribution to the international debate about child abuse as reflected to the public through the power of the media.