Child and Youth Agency in Science Fiction

Child and Youth Agency in Science Fiction
Author: Ingrid E. Castro
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 305
Release: 2019-10-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1498597394

Child and Youth Agency in Science Fiction: Travel, Technology, Time intersects considerations about children’s and youth’s agency with the popular culture genre of science fiction. As scholars in childhood studies and beyond seek to expand understandings of agency in children’s lives, this collection places science fiction at the heart of this endeavor. Retellings of the past, narratives of the present, and new landscapes of the future, each explored in science fiction, allow for creative reimaginings of the capabilities, movements, and agency of youth. Core themes of generation, embodiment, family, identity, belonging, gender, and friendship traverse across the chapters and inform the contributors’ readings of various film, literature, television, and virtual media sources. Here, children and youth are heterogeneous, and agency as a central analytical concept is interrogated through interdisciplinary, intersectional, intergenerational, and posthuman analyses. The contributors argue that there is vast power in science fiction representations of children’s agency to challenge accepted notions of neoliberal agency, enhance understandings of agency in childhood studies, and further contextualize agency in the lives, voices, and cultures of youth.

Childhood, Agency, and Fantasy

Childhood, Agency, and Fantasy
Author: Ingrid E. Castro
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 291
Release: 2021-01-12
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1498594301

Joining the emergent interdisciplinary investment in bridging the social sciences and the humanities, Childhood, Agency, and Fantasy: Walking in Other Worlds explores linkages between children’s agency and fantasy. Fantasy as an integral aspect of childhood and as a genre allows for children’s spectacular dreams and hopeful realities. Friendship, family, identity, loyalty, belongingness, citizenry, and emotionality are central concepts explored in chapters that are anchored by humanities texts of television, film, and literature, but also by social science qualitative methods of participant observation and interviews. Fantasy has the capacity to be a revolutionary change agent that in its modernity can creatively reflect, critique, or reimagine the social, political, and cultural norms of our world. Such promise is also found to be true of children’s agency, wherein children’s beings and becomings, rooted in childhood’s freedoms and constraints, result in a range of outcomes. In the endeavor to broaden theory and research on children’s agency, fantasy becomes a point of possibility with its expanding subjectivities, far-reaching terrain, and spirit of adventure.

Representing Agency in Popular Culture

Representing Agency in Popular Culture
Author: Ingrid E. Castro
Publisher: Lexington Books
Total Pages: 333
Release: 2018-12-20
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1498574955

Representing Agency in Popular Culture: Children and Youth on Page, Screen and In-Between addresses the intersection of children’s and youth’s agency and popular culture. As scholars in childhood studies and beyond seek to expand understandings of agency, power, and voice in children’s lives, this book places popular culture and representation as central to this endeavor. Core themes of family, gender, temporality, politics, education, technology, disability, conflict, identity, ethnicity, and friendship traverse across the chapters, framed through various film, television, literature, and virtual media sources. Here, childhood is considered far from homogeneous and the dominance of neoliberal models of agency is questioned by intersectional and intergenerational analyses. This book posits there is vast power in popular culture representations of children’s agency, and interrogation of these themes through interdisciplinary lenses is vital to furthering knowledge and understanding about children’s lives and within childhood studies.

Historical Dictionary of Children's Literature

Historical Dictionary of Children's Literature
Author: Emer O'Sullivan
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 443
Release: 2023-04-24
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1538122928

History is constantly evolving, and the history of children’s literature is no exception. Since the original publication of Emer O’Sullivan’s Historical Dictionary of Children’s Literature in 2010, much has happened in the field of children’s literature. New authors have come into print, new books have won awards, and new ideas have entered the discourse within children’s literature studies. Historical Dictionary of Children's Literature, Second Edition contains a chronology, an introduction, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has more than 700 cross-referenced entries. This book will be an excellent resource for students, scholars, researchers, and anyone interested in the field of children’s literature studies.

Children and Childhood in the Works of Stephen King

Children and Childhood in the Works of Stephen King
Author: Debbie Olson
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 353
Release: 2020-10-06
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1793600139

This unique and timely collection examines childhood and the child character throughout Stephen King’s works, from his early novels and short stories, through film adaptations, to his most recent publications. King’s use of child characters within the framework of horror (or of horrific childhood) raises questions about adult expectations of children, childhood, the American family, child agency, and the nature of fear and terror for (or by) children. The ways in which King presents, complicates, challenges, or terrorizes children and notions of childhood provide a unique lens through which to examine American culture, including both adult and social anxieties about children and childhood across the decades of King’s works.

Agency and Participation in Childhood and Youth

Agency and Participation in Childhood and Youth
Author: Caroline Sarojini Hart
Publisher: A&C Black
Total Pages: 297
Release: 2014-02-27
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1472514866

Agency and Participation in Childhood and Youth presents new critical engagement in conceptualising the roles of youth agency and participation in education, development and the pursuit of social justice. Theoretically, the book is framed within the paradigm of the capability approach, initially developed by Nobel Laureate, Amartya Sen, and further differentiated by others, including philosopher, Martha Nussbaum. The book unravels the complex relationships between the nature of youth agency and participation, in education, but also in wider political, economic and social arenas, and the potential of young people to expand their freedoms to lead lives they have reason to value. It is thus argued that ethical, sustainable development is contingent on the nature of youth agency and participation in schooling and further afield. Bringing together leading international experts researching children's capabilities, Agency and Participation in Childhood and Youth offers a unique exploration of links between exciting new areas of development in theory, research and practical applications of Sen and Nussbaum's ideas. The book addresses a significant gap in the literature drawing on empirical data from the UK, the USA, Jordan, Palestine, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Switzerland, New Zealand and beyond, with perspectives presented from both within and outside schools and other formal educational settings. Agency and Participation in Childhood and Youth is of particular interest to academics, teaching professionals, undergraduate and postgraduate students of education studies, social policy, youth and development studies.

Screening Children in Post-apocalypse Film and Television

Screening Children in Post-apocalypse Film and Television
Author: Debbie Olson
Publisher: Lexington Books
Total Pages: 233
Release: 2023-11-16
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1666918687

This collection examines the child’s role in contemporary post-apocalyptic films and television.. By exploring the function of child characters within a dystopian framework, this volume illustrates how traditional notions of childhood are tethered to sites of adult conflict and disaster, a connection that often works to reaffirm the “rightness” of past systems of social order.

Vigilante Feminists and Agents of Destiny

Vigilante Feminists and Agents of Destiny
Author: Laura Mattoon D'Amore
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 177
Release: 2021-04-07
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1793630615

This interdisciplinary study examines the relationship between violence, empowerment, and the teenage super/heroine in comics and young adult fantasy novels. The author analyzes stories of teenage super/heroines who have experienced trauma, abduction, assault, and sexual violence that has led to a loss of agency, and then tracks the way that their use of violence empowers them to reclaim agency over their lives and bodies. The author identifies these characters as vigilante feminist teenage super/heroines because they become vigilantes in order to protect other girls and young women from violence and create safer communities. The teenage super/heroines examined in this book are characters who have the ability—through super power, or supernatural and magical ability—to fight back against those who seek to cause them harm. They are a product of and a response to both the pervasive culture of violence against girls and women and a system that fails to protect girls and women from harm. While this book is part of a robust intellectual conversation about the role of girls and women in popular literature and culture and about feminist analyses of comics and YA literature, it is unique in its reading of violence as empowerment and in its careful tracing—and naming—of the teenage vigilante super/heroine, a characterization that is hugely popular and deserves this close reading.

The Avatar Television Franchise

The Avatar Television Franchise
Author: Francis M. Agnoli
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 257
Release: 2022-12-29
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1501387197

Nickelodeon's Avatar: The Last Airbender (2005-08) and its sequel The Legend of Korra (2012-14) are among the most acclaimed and influential U.S. animated television series of the 21st century. Yet, despite their elevated status, there have been few academic works published about them. The Avatar Television Franchise: Storytelling, Identity, Trauma, Fandom and Reception remedies this gap by bringing together a wide range of scholarly writings on these shows. This edited collection is comprised of 13 chapters organized into 4 sections, featuring close readings of key episodes, analyzing how they create meaning as well as illustrating how established theories can guide those readings. Some chapters explore different theories relating to identity as well as considering the repercussions of depicting real-world identities in these shows, while others examine the various manifestations of trauma from throughout the franchise as well as illustrates different scholarly approaches to the topic. Still others utilize fan studies to understand the myriad ways viewers have responded to and interpreted the Avatar franchise.