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Child as Citizen
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Release Date:15 Aug 2025
ISBN:9781496858412
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Release Date:15 Aug 2025
ISBN:9781496858405
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Child as Citizen

Agency and Activism in Children's Literature and Culture

Edited by Giuliana Fenech
University Press of Mississippi

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.

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

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.

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

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