Childhood and Governance

This edited volume offers in-depth analyses of childhood as a social technology of governance. Contributions explore the ways in which dominant ideas about childhood bear on governance in a range of specific contexts, spanning the personal, the local and the global. Each chapter reveals important insights into how ‘imagined childhood’ functions as an ubiquitous and powerful social technology of governance. In so doing, they highlight the importance of theorizing childhood not as a time of life, but as a cardinal category of identity/difference that is indispensable to social meaning-making. Rooted in critical childhood studies, the book explores how ‘imagined’ childhoods not only govern children’s lives, but also constitute adult subjects, institutions, states and other political orders.