Matthew C. Benwell – författare

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.

Young people, and in particular children, have typically been marginalised in geopolitical research, positioned as too young to understand or relate to the adult-dominated world of international relations. Integrating current debates in critical geopolitics and political geography with research in children’s geographies, childhood studies and youth research, this book sets out an agenda for the field of children’s and young people’s critical geopolitics. It considers diverse practices such as play, activism, media consumption and diplomacy to show how children’s and young people’s lives relate to wider regional and global geopolitical processes. Engaging with contemporary concepts in human geography including ludic geopolitics, affect, emotional geographies, intergenerationality, creative diplomacy, popular geopolitics and citizenship, the authors draw on geopolitical research with children and young people from Europe, Asia, Australasia, Africa and the Americas. The chapters highlight the ways in which young people can be enrolled, ignored, dismissed, empowered and represented by the state for geopolitical ends. Notwithstanding this state power, the research presented also shows how young people have agency and make decisions about their lives which are influenced by wider geopolitical processes. The focus on the lives of children and young people problematises and extends what it is we think of when considering ’the geopolitical’ which enriches as well as advances critical geopolitical enquiry and deserves to be taken seriously by political geographies more broadly.

Young people, and in particular children, have typically been marginalised in geopolitical research, positioned as too young to understand or relate to the adult-dominated world of international relations. Integrating current debates in critical geopolitics and political geography with research in children’s geographies, childhood studies and youth research, this book sets out an agenda for the field of children’s and young people’s critical geopolitics. It considers diverse practices such as play, activism, media consumption and diplomacy to show how children’s and young people’s lives relate to wider regional and global geopolitical processes. Engaging with contemporary concepts in human geography including ludic geopolitics, affect, emotional geographies, intergenerationality, creative diplomacy, popular geopolitics and citizenship, the authors draw on geopolitical research with children and young people from Europe, Asia, Australasia, Africa and the Americas. The chapters highlight the ways in which young people can be enrolled, ignored, dismissed, empowered and represented by the state for geopolitical ends. Notwithstanding this state power, the research presented also shows how young people have agency and make decisions about their lives which are influenced by wider geopolitical processes. The focus on the lives of children and young people problematises and extends what it is we think of when considering ’the geopolitical’ which enriches as well as advances critical geopolitical enquiry and deserves to be taken seriously by political geographies more broadly.

Telling the stories of young refugees in a range of international urban settings, this book explores how newcomers navigate urban spaces and negotiate multiple injustices in their everyday lives. This innovative edited volume is based on in-depth, qualitative research with young refugees and their perspectives on migration, social relations and cultural spaces. The chapters give voice to refugee youth from a wide variety of social backgrounds, including insights about their migration experiences, their negotiations of spatial justice and injustice, and the diverse ways in which they use urban space.