This resource piece explores commonly held adult beliefs about young people’s play and challenges some of these ideas through published research and examples from child and youth participatory fan cultures. We begin this piece by examining some of these misconceptions and myths, primarily the ideas that children’s play is in decline, that children’s play is trivial and non-productive, that popular culture reduces children’s desire to play, and that children are no longer creating their own cultural artifacts (Small 259). Challenging these assumptions, we discuss the ways that children and youth engage in three participatory fan activities—writing fanfiction, creating fan videos, and participating in cosplay—drawing on examples from a range of popular youth fandoms including Harry Potter, Girl Meets World, Percy Jackson, The Avengers, Monster High, and the Hunger Games.

Figurations of the child frequently establish and rely upon a linear conception of time. This article is a response to the problematic linearity of teleological developmentalism through a discussion of non-linear theoretical and fictional approaches to the figuration of the child. The author discusses some of the issues that have been raised with linear developmental models and joins a growing chorus of childhood studies and early education scholars by working against the constrictions of linear time. This article conceptualizes non-linear models of time and development, through exploration of Michael Ende’s Momo, a young adult novel that theorizes non-linear time, and Charlie Mackesy’s The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse, a contemporary best-seller that defies age categorization and invites non-linear material interaction (i.e., defying the determined action of reading from front to back and left to right). This article introduces and exemplifies the concept of “atemporal presence” to define the timeless present moment from which Momo’s titular character operates, and it offers the idea of “growing out” as an alternative to notions of “growing up.” This author illustrates how establishing non-linear conceptions of time and development creates sites for free, non-hierarchical growth.

This year promises to be a busy one for author Chloe Gong, best known for her Shakespeare-inspired young adult, "historical sci-fi" novels These Violent Delights (2020), Our Violent Ends (2021), and Foul Lady Fortune (2022) ('Chloe Gong'). Two novellas spinning off from her Romeo and Juliet retellings have been recently released, Last Violent Call: A Foul Thing and This Foul Murder, both set among warring gangster families in 1920s Shanghai. Before the year ends, they will be followed by Foul Heart Huntsman as well as her debut novel for adult readers, Immortal Longings (both forthcoming 2023). Billed as Antony and Cleopatra meets Hunger Games, the latter is the first instalment in her series Flesh and False Gods. Women and Shakespeare podcast host Varsha Panjwani described Gong, in her introduction to an episode dedicated to the novelist, as a "a young and minority woman author" who was born in Shanghai, grew up in New Zealand, and went to university in the United States ('Chloe Gong'). This smorgasbord of culture-crossing resembles that of Gong's heroine Juliette Cai. Gong has spoken of the way in which her life experiences inform her treatment of diaspora, colonialism, cultural imperialism, identity, and their relationship to canonical literature in her works in interview ('Chloe Gong'). I first read Gong's work at a time when I was organising research seminars for undergraduate students on literary translation in schools and resistance to Englishisation in education, led respectively by Clémentine Beauvais (herself an author and translator) and Ursula Lanvers. Around that time, I was engaging with historic and contemporary practices of Shakespeare in translation in East Asia and planning undergraduate modules on Shakespeare and YA literature ready for a year's teaching at Kobe College, a Japanese university. I was fascinated by Gong's use of languages other than English in her dominantly Anglophone work. I was intrigued by the code-switching cool of her characters; characters young people might identify with and wish to emulate. My interest was further piqued by the way in which her non-English usages are sometimes translated into English, sometimes not. I pondered the potential of her books to excite young Anglophones about the learning and use of other languages, in a context of the decline of language education in the UK and comparable Anglophone countries, which intersects with the global trend towards Englishisation (I share evidence of this later). I discuss some examples of Gong's use of languages other than English from These Violent Delights and Our Violent Ends in detail in subsequent paragraphs, but they will make more sense to the uninitiated if I first give some details of Gong's adaptations of Romeo and Juliet. Gong describes 1920s Shanghai as a "melting pot of native Chinese and then immigrants who were fleeing. There were Russians and then Jews and then all the persecuted peoples in Europe. And then there were colonists and imperialists coming in to persecute people" ('Chloe Gong'). Her Capulets are the Chinese Cai family; her Montagues are White Russian émigrés, the Montagovs. Her Mercutio, Marshall Seo, claims Korean as well as Chinese heritage. These main characters are multilingual, several of them European educated, easily able to understand and converse in the English and French of the international settlements, rapidly and frequently codeswitching between these languages as well as multiple Chinese dialects such as Shanghainese. Gong exploits and emphasises "the mutual incomprehensibility of diverse branches of Chinese" (Steiner 32). She adds smatterings of Italian, Dutch and Latin to her characters thoughts and speech, denoting the speakers' international mobility and European cultural capital, as well as Japanese, hinting at Japan's burgeoning imperial project at the time.

The present article analyzes the use of proverbs in The Inheritance Games (2020), the first book of the novel trilogy of the same name, currently enjoying great popularity and commercial success among young readers. In the first half of the book, proverbs are a central theme in the development of the action, continuing to be used frequently by various characters throughout the rest of the book, especially by Avery Grambs, the protagonist and first-person narrator. This use of proverbs in a novel targeted at young adults is remarkable inasmuch as they are a discourse device most commonly associated with older generations and traditions. Furthermore, proverbs contribute to the portrayal of various characters, illustrating their paremiological competence and the different ways in which they may be employed as established by proverb scholarship. As a result, the relevance of proverbs for the plot and their frequency of appearance challenges the widespread belief that they are old-fashioned uses of languages most frequently employed by older adults, potentially promoting an interest in them among teenagers and young adults reading the series.

Children’s participation in the digital environment is gaining more attention as children seem to be active audiences, selecting and developing digital skills to access and interact across multiple platforms and devices. Nonetheless, little is known about media participation from the children’s perspective. This article presents the quantitative results of a survey of 244 children aged seven to fourteen years in Colombia about their perception of media use as a form of participation. The study’s results suggest that there is a varied range of media uses for different purposes that are not exclusive to just one device or one type of media. These results are significant as they show the way children look at their media landscape and engage with it. The authors also identify children’s perception of participation as well as their feelings regarding their media engagement. This research gives particular impetus to efforts aimed at recognizing the meanings of children’s participation in the media environment beyond the political and the civic duties to the social and the playful, incorporating children’s perceptions, experiences, and roles in society.