Child As Citizen
Agency and Activism in Children's Literature and Culture
Published on 15. August 2025
Book
Hardback
268 pages
978-1-4968-5840-5 (ISBN)
Description
Contributions by Daniela Brockdorff, Nina Christensen, Jill Coste, Katrin Dautel, Justyna Deszcz-Tryhubczak, Giuliana Fenech, Naomi Hamer, Irena Barbara Kalla, Anne Klomberg, Sonali Kulkarni, Elizabeth Leach-Leung, Ann Marie Murnaghan, Emily Murphy, Emilie Owens, Nicola Parker, Patrycja Poniatowska, Meg Rosoff, and Farriba Schulz.
Child as Citizen: Agency and Activism in Children's Literature and Culture addresses children's and young adult agency and activism across literature and culture, demonstrating how these forces influence child citizenship. Contributors to this volume highlight the agentic voices and activist practices that are growing across all spheres of young people's lives, as well as the challenges to active citizenship that children growing up in unjust sociopolitical contexts face. The volume is interdisciplinary and draws on the sociology of childhood, children's literature studies, youth culture studies, media, technology, and cultural studies, and Anthropocene, ecofeminist, and disability studies.
Agency occurs in and around literature and storytelling, and this collection establishes how it is always influenced by identity as well as geopolitics; how it is both subjective and collective; how it is cultural and embodied; and how, like citizenship, it is not a static status but rather an ongoing negotiation. In this collection, contributors invite readers to consider agency as a system of relations between children themselves, between children and adults, children and institutions, and children and nation-states, as well as between children and the nonhuman. This book reviews the interconnectedness between these relationships and attempts to untangle some of the complications that emerge.
Child as Citizen: Agency and Activism in Children's Literature and Culture addresses children's and young adult agency and activism across literature and culture, demonstrating how these forces influence child citizenship. Contributors to this volume highlight the agentic voices and activist practices that are growing across all spheres of young people's lives, as well as the challenges to active citizenship that children growing up in unjust sociopolitical contexts face. The volume is interdisciplinary and draws on the sociology of childhood, children's literature studies, youth culture studies, media, technology, and cultural studies, and Anthropocene, ecofeminist, and disability studies.
Agency occurs in and around literature and storytelling, and this collection establishes how it is always influenced by identity as well as geopolitics; how it is both subjective and collective; how it is cultural and embodied; and how, like citizenship, it is not a static status but rather an ongoing negotiation. In this collection, contributors invite readers to consider agency as a system of relations between children themselves, between children and adults, children and institutions, and children and nation-states, as well as between children and the nonhuman. This book reviews the interconnectedness between these relationships and attempts to untangle some of the complications that emerge.
Reviews / Votes
"A timely publication on child citizenship, agency, rights, and activism that explores a variety of contexts-from literature to TikTok videos to nightly museum activities." - Vanessa Joosen, author of Adulthood in Children's Literature and editor of Connecting Childhood and Old Age in Popular Media"A truly engaged, highly intelligent, and very assured collection about the possibilities of agency as enabled through children's literatures and cultures." - Blanka Grzegorczyk, author of Terror and Counter-Terror in Contemporary British Children's Literature and Discourses of Postcolonialism in Contemporary British Children's Literature
More details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
Jackson
United States
Target group
College/higher education
Product notice
Paper over boards
Illustrations
5 b&w illustrations
Dimensions
Height: 235 mm
Width: 157 mm
Thickness: 20 mm
Weight
590 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-4968-5840-5 (9781496858405)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
E-Book
08/2025
University of Pennsylvania Press, Inc.
€29.49
Available for download
Person
Giuliana Fenech is a senior lecturer in the Department of English at University of Malta, specializing in work involving children's and young adult literature and citizenship, agency, creative protest, and activism. She is currently the principal investigator of an Erasmus K2 HED project called Seen and Heard: Young Adult Voices and Freedom of Expression. Additionally, Fenech runs a storytelling organization, Lignin Stories, which works with diverse groups of children and youth in Malta and across Europe.
Content
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Agency, Activism, and Citizenship in Children's and Young Adult Literature and Culture
Giuliana Fenech
Part I. The Urgent Need for Care-Full Activism: An Author, Activist, and Academic's Perspective
Chapter 1: "Do You Think You'll Ever Write a Real Book?" Troubled Children and the Trouble with Writing for Children in 2022
Meg Rosoff
Chapter 2: A Human Rights Practitioner's Perspective: How Literature for Children Can Support Their Rights to Justice, Dignity, and Voice
Nicola Parker
Chapter 3: Labors of Care: A Proposition of a Care-Full Children's Culture Studies
Justyna Deszcz-Tryhubczak
Part II. Literary Agency and a Recasting of Equitable Child Citizenship
Chapter 4: Relational Agency, Children's Literature, and Childhood
Nina Christensen
Chapter 5: Resisting Eugenic Legacies: Child Agency in Protecting Disabled Citizenship in Children's and Young Adult Literature
Elizabeth Leach-Leung
Chapter 6: From Ageism to Agency: Generation Z Authors as Inevitable Activists
Jill Coste
Part III. Childhood Ecologies and the Agency to Act and Heal
Chapter 7: Shifting Boundaries: Objects, Narratives, and Nonhuman Entities as Means Toward Agency in Narratives on Child Abuse and Neglect
Daniela Brockdorff and Katrin Dautel
Chapter 8: Ecological Education in Twenty-First-Century Children's Literature About the Holocaust: A Comparative Ecocritical Reading
Irena Barbara Kalla and Patrycja Poniatowska (translator)
Chapter 9: Roots of Rebellion: An Ecofeminist Reading of Citizenship and Climate Activism in Adolescent Fiction
Anne Klomberg
Part IV. Systemic Agency and Sites of Recognition and Engagement
Chapter 10: Reading of What Is Yet to Come: Anthropocentric Children's Literature and Childhood Agency
Farriba Schulz
Chapter 11: Can You Hear My Voice? Participatory Research as a Method for Reclaiming Children's Agency in the Archive
Emily Murphy
Chapter 12: Exploring the Museum at Night: Young People's Agency and Citizenship in Museum-Related Children's Literature and Programming
Naomi Hamer and Ann Marie Murnaghan
Chapter 13: Young Adult Agency on BookTok: A Practice Theory Inquiry into Young Readers' Active Reshaping of Digital Literary Criticism on TikTok
Sonali Kulkarni and Emilie Owens
About the Contributors
Index
Introduction: Agency, Activism, and Citizenship in Children's and Young Adult Literature and Culture
Giuliana Fenech
Part I. The Urgent Need for Care-Full Activism: An Author, Activist, and Academic's Perspective
Chapter 1: "Do You Think You'll Ever Write a Real Book?" Troubled Children and the Trouble with Writing for Children in 2022
Meg Rosoff
Chapter 2: A Human Rights Practitioner's Perspective: How Literature for Children Can Support Their Rights to Justice, Dignity, and Voice
Nicola Parker
Chapter 3: Labors of Care: A Proposition of a Care-Full Children's Culture Studies
Justyna Deszcz-Tryhubczak
Part II. Literary Agency and a Recasting of Equitable Child Citizenship
Chapter 4: Relational Agency, Children's Literature, and Childhood
Nina Christensen
Chapter 5: Resisting Eugenic Legacies: Child Agency in Protecting Disabled Citizenship in Children's and Young Adult Literature
Elizabeth Leach-Leung
Chapter 6: From Ageism to Agency: Generation Z Authors as Inevitable Activists
Jill Coste
Part III. Childhood Ecologies and the Agency to Act and Heal
Chapter 7: Shifting Boundaries: Objects, Narratives, and Nonhuman Entities as Means Toward Agency in Narratives on Child Abuse and Neglect
Daniela Brockdorff and Katrin Dautel
Chapter 8: Ecological Education in Twenty-First-Century Children's Literature About the Holocaust: A Comparative Ecocritical Reading
Irena Barbara Kalla and Patrycja Poniatowska (translator)
Chapter 9: Roots of Rebellion: An Ecofeminist Reading of Citizenship and Climate Activism in Adolescent Fiction
Anne Klomberg
Part IV. Systemic Agency and Sites of Recognition and Engagement
Chapter 10: Reading of What Is Yet to Come: Anthropocentric Children's Literature and Childhood Agency
Farriba Schulz
Chapter 11: Can You Hear My Voice? Participatory Research as a Method for Reclaiming Children's Agency in the Archive
Emily Murphy
Chapter 12: Exploring the Museum at Night: Young People's Agency and Citizenship in Museum-Related Children's Literature and Programming
Naomi Hamer and Ann Marie Murnaghan
Chapter 13: Young Adult Agency on BookTok: A Practice Theory Inquiry into Young Readers' Active Reshaping of Digital Literary Criticism on TikTok
Sonali Kulkarni and Emilie Owens
About the Contributors
Index