Figuring the Future: Globalization and the Temporalities of Children and Youth

Abstract

Child laborers in South Asia, child soldiers in Sierra Leone and Uganda, Chinese playing computer games to earn virtual gold, involved in sex trafficking in the former Soviet republics and Thailand: these are just some of the young people featured in the news of late. The idea that young people are more malleable and the truisms that youth are the future or are our hope for the future give news stories and scholarly accounts added meaning. To address how and why and children have come to seem so important to globalization, the contributors to this book look at the both the spatial relations and the temporal dimensions of globalization in places as far apart as Oakland, California, and Tamatave, Madagascar, in situations as disparate as the idealization of childhood innocence and the brutal lives of street children. Discourses of, and practices by, and children, from the design of toys to political mobilization, are critical sites through which people everywhere conceive of, produce, contest, and naturalize the new futures.