Spyros Spyrou – 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.

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.

Disclosing Childhoods offers a critical account of knowledge production in childhood studies. The book argues for the need to be reflexive about the knowledge practices of the field and to scrutinize the role of researchers in disclosing certain childhoods rather than others. A relational lens is used to critique the ongoing fixation of childhood studies with the unitary child-agent and to re-introduce the question of ontology in knowledge production.  The author provides a critical account of childhood studies’ trajectory, as well as exploring the key concepts of voice, agency and participation, illustrating the potential of a reflexive stance towards knowledge production. Drawing on poststructuralist and posthumanist thinking, each of these concepts is critiqued for its conceptual limits while productive avenues are offered to reconfigure their utility.  Spyrou also addresses the ethics and politics of knowledge production and considers key emerging insights whichcan contribute towards the development of a more reflexive and critical childhood studies.

Students and scholars across a range of disciplines, including childhood studies, anthropology, sociology and geography, will find this book of interest, as well as those interested in qualitative research methodology and social theory.   

This book explores questions related to social and cultural sustainability of coastal communities in transition through the lens of childhood. Contributors explore diverse local and national contexts spanning several countries aiming to shed light on the shifting and dynamic interplay between education, knowledge production, society and working life in coastal environments from an intergenerational perspective. Key points that are disclosed are:

The book will address the challenges to sustainability experienced by local communities in light of local, national and global social and economic changes. Looking at these challenges cross-nationally and through the lens of childhood, and knowledge production across generations, will provide for a much-needed perspective in ongoing discussion on sustainability in coastal communities.