Children, Young People and the Future (Routledge Spaces of Childhood and Youth Series)

This book explores the intersections between children, childhood, youth, and the future and provides critical understandings of how the future is imagined, conceptualised, enlisted, used, negotiated, and manipulated to serve diverse political ends and social imaginaries.

It foregrounds the value and utility of the notion of the future as it manifests in the daily lives of children and young people, as well as conceptually in the scholarly discussions and debates which are currently unfolding around this concept and the temporalities of childhood and youth. It enriches understandings of how children and youth imagine, create, and enact their futures and of the ways in which their futures and presents are mutually constituted and intertwined. Going beyond simplistic and stereotypical identifications of children and young people with the future, this edited book presents empirical and theoretical discussions of childhood/youth and the future with a view to offering a deeper and more nuanced understanding of these intersections.

The book will be of much interest to students of anthropology, sociology, geography, childhood studies, and youth studies.

Matthew C. Benwell is Reader of Human Geography at Newcastle University, UK. He is co-editor of Children, Young People, and Critical Geopolitics, Refugee Youth: Migration, Justice and Urban Space and was co-editor of the journal Children’s Geographies.

Spyros Spyrou is Professor of Anthropology at European University Cyprus. He is the author of Disclosing Childhoods: Research and Knowledge Production for a Critical Childhood Studies and co-editor of Reimagining Childhood Studies, Children and Borders and Valuing the Past, Sustaining the Future? Exploring Coastal Societies, Childhood(s) and Local Knowledge in Times of Global Transition.

Eleni Theodorou is Associate Professor of Social Foundations of Education at European University Cyprus. Her work is situated in childhood studies as well as in the fields of sociology and anthropology of education.