Refusing the Limits of Contemporary Childhood: Beyond Innocence (Critical Childhood & Youth Studies: Theoretical Explorations and Practices in Clinical, Educational, Social, and Cultural Settings)

Each of the essays in this collection considers what lies beyond the limiting discourses of childhood innocence. Instead of focusing on how children “grow up,” as has been the focus of developmental science for over a century, we ask what it might mean for discourses of childhood to finally “grow out” of childhood innocence? The authors featured in this volume explore this question through critical approaches that actively refuse the limits of normative and normalizing conceptions of the child by surfacing and centering complex, multiplicitous configurations of childhood. Together, these perspectives challenge existing discourses and social practices to reveal how power operates in and through the child and its uses.

Adam Davies is Assistant Professor in the College of Arts/College of Social and Applied Human Sciences at the University of Guelph, Guelph, Canada.

Mayurika Chakravorty is Assistant Professor in the Department of English and the Institute of Interdisciplinary Studies (Childhood and Youth Studies program), Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada. She was a Felix doctoral scholar and holds a Ph.D. from the School of Oriental and African Studies, London, UK. She was a visiting scholar at the Centre for Research in Children's Literature at Cambridge for the Easter Term, 2024. She researches and writes on fantasy and speculative literature; children's literature; and the representation of childhood and girlhood in literature and media.