Children As the Future: Rights & Representations

Children have long been associated with futurity -- be it as future promise, as caveats from the future or as our responsibility to the future. Illustrative examples of "children as the future" are manifest in precolonial indigenous beliefs (e.g. the Haudenosaunee Seven Generations principle); in colonial practices (e.g., residential schools); in current political debates (e.g., the rights of the unborn); or in global discourses about the future of humanity (e.g., climate change, generative AI, gene editing etc.) As Lee Edelman points out in No Future, political ideologies often legitimate their actions in the name of children of the future, to the point that “we are no more able to conceive of a politics without a fantasy of the future than we are able to conceive of a future without the figure of the Child” (11).

Juxtaposed with aspirational, ideological models of children and the future, there is the harsh reality that many children experience in the world today. Children account for 25% of the world’s population, yet 20% of these children live in conflict zones, 33% of children under 5 suffer from severe malnutrition and 40% of the world’s refugees are children. Children have rarely been granted equal rights with adults, but rather are considered a vulnerable sector in need of protection. Many children today are resisting this neo-imperial, adult-centric, humanitarian model which dismisses children’s voices, agency, participation and protagonism. On the contrary, increasingly, youth and child activists are rising up to demand a viable future for themselves and other children (e.g., Greta Thurnberg, Malala Yousafzai etc).

This panel aims to explore varied and resistant ways “children as the future” may be conceptualized or represented in relation to rights issues. Possible presentations might examine

Theorizations of "children as the future,” reproductive futurism, decolonial futures, post-human childhood studies etc.
Cultural approaches to children’s rights (e.g., African Children’s Charter, indigenous teachings, religious beliefs)
Children's rights (e.g., gender rights, child soldiers, child slavery, right to play, rights of girls to (sex) education etc.)
Children in (post-)conflict areas (e.g., Rwanda, Gaza, Ukraine etc.)
Youth protest and resistance movements (e.g., protagonismo infantil, Fridays for the Future, Soweto Uprising etc)
Youth Activists (e.g., Licypriya Kangujam, Latifatou Compaoré, Shina Novalinga)
Environmental rights and emerging rights (e.g., gene hacking, robots, AI, privacy etc.)
In ecolit, cli-fi. sci-fi, fantasy, dystopian, utopian, Afrofuturist, Indigenous futurist, children's or YA texts
In the visual arts, music, dance, museum exhibits etc.

Proposals that consider non-Western contexts are particularly welcome, as are submissions by graduate students and youth activists. For any queries about the seminar, please contact Madelaine Hron, [email protected]