Revisiting Contemporary Childhoods

International Research on Children’s Voice and Agency

Pallawi Sinha, Sarah Richards, Marianna Stella

• Publisher: Policy Press
• Year: 2026
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781447371816
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Civics & Citizenship
• Index: Social Sciences

What does it mean to put children's voices at the centre and truly recognise their capacity for change?

Through rich, interdisciplinary research spanning Australia, Poland, Spain, Slovakia, India and the UK, this book illuminates how children actively negotiate, resist and reshape the structures around them. It champions children's agency as central to reimagining childhoods beyond western-dominated narratives, advocating for child-led theorisation and practice.

Offering a timely and critical examination of the tensions shaping children's lives – across societies, systems and settings – it challenges readers to rethink the dominant idealisations of childhood, pushing forward new conversations about childhood in the 21st century.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Notes on Contributors
• Foreword by Alison Clark
• Introduction
• 1 Valuing childness
• 2 Children’s playful artistic representations as catalysts to navigate and construct social and cultural worlds
• 3 Foster children’s participative citizenship within the context of family relationships: the case of Spain
• 4 Children as active agents shaping women’s strategies in terminating male-to-female intimate partner violence
• 5 Misogyny uploaded: the influence of digital misogyny and the manosphere in boys and adolescents’ identities
• 6 The struggle facing children and professionals in relation to child participation in public law Children Act proceedings
• 7 Are NGO schools for marginal childhoods congruous (non)places?
• 8 Children as witnesses of death and mourning: reflections on wartime memories and drawings from World War II
• 9 Politicising childhoods
• Index