Cultural Politics of Childhood

The term cultural politics of childhood refers to the ways in which childhood unfolds for children in relation to the theories, politics, policies, and practices that are used to understand, approach, control, and regulate children’s lives. Understanding children’s lives and childhood through the politics of culture was first considered in Sharon Stephens’s book, Children and the Politics of Culture. She argued that toward the end of the 20th century, large-scale global forces started to threaten and redefine the boundaries of national and local cultures. At the same time, the proliferation of subcultures and ethnic groups along with the quest for recognition of diverse groups challenged homogeneous and stable identities and the nature of culture.

These transformations warranted consideration, first, of how international and local politics of ...