Spyros Spyrou - Böcker

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.

Reimagining Childhood Studies incites, and provides a forum for, dialogue and debate about the direction and impetus for critical and global approaches to social-cultural studies of children and their childhoods. Set against the backdrop of a quarter century of research and theorising arising out of the “new” social studies of childhood, each of the 13 original contributions strives to extend the conceptual reach and relevance of the work being undertaken in the dynamic and expanding field of childhood studies in the 21st century. Internationally renowned contributors engage with contemporary scholarship from both the global north and south to address questions of power, inequity, reflexivity, subjectivities and representation from poststructuralist, posthumanist, postcolonial, feminist, queer studies and political economy perspectives. In so doing, the book provides a deconstructive and reconstructive dialogue, offering a renewed agenda for future scholarship. The book also moves the insights of childhood studies beyond the boundaries of this field, helping to mainstream insights about children’s everyday lives from this burgeoning area of study and avoid the dangers of marginalizing both children and scholarship about childhood. This carefully curated collection extends beyond critiques of specified research arenas, traditions, concepts or approaches to serve as a bridge in the transformation of childhood studies at this important juncture in its history.

Reimagining Childhood Studies incites, and provides a forum for, dialogue and debate about the direction and impetus for critical and global approaches to social-cultural studies of children and their childhoods. Set against the backdrop of a quarter century of research and theorising arising out of the “new” social studies of childhood, each of the 13 original contributions strives to extend the conceptual reach and relevance of the work being undertaken in the dynamic and expanding field of childhood studies in the 21st century. Internationally renowned contributors engage with contemporary scholarship from both the global north and south to address questions of power, inequity, reflexivity, subjectivities and representation from poststructuralist, posthumanist, postcolonial, feminist, queer studies and political economy perspectives. In so doing, the book provides a deconstructive and reconstructive dialogue, offering a renewed agenda for future scholarship. The book also moves the insights of childhood studies beyond the boundaries of this field, helping to mainstream insights about children’s everyday lives from this burgeoning area of study and avoid the dangers of marginalizing both children and scholarship about childhood. This carefully curated collection extends beyond critiques of specified research arenas, traditions, concepts or approaches to serve as a bridge in the transformation of childhood studies at this important juncture in its history.

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 current threat to the social and cultural sustainability of coastal communities in different local and national contexts, and the reason they must be preservedthe centrality of processes of inter generational transmission of local knowledge to the preservation and development of sustainable coastal communitiesthe central role of children and young people as actors in creating sustainable livelihoods, economies and knowledge in coastal communities for the future?the practices acrossdifferent country contextsThe 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.