Volume 48, numéro 1, janvier 2023 Time Special Issue Sous la direction de Zsuzsa Millei et Camila da Rosa Ribeiro

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Children’s growth has long been measured against the axis of time. Yet anthropometric indexes such as age for height measurements do not simply mark the passage of time and associated growth but themselves indicate “norms” that stand as markers of potential. Charting changing modes of representing the problem of children’s growth over the 20th century and into the 21st, this paper attends to visual technologies that distribute potential unevenly around the world, asking what is at stake in making children’s growth and development visible, and whose potential is affirmed in the process?

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Temporality is recognized as critical to the understanding of childhoods by contemporary scholars of childhood. This paper explores the varying temporalities through which marginal childhoods (and their educational inclusion), particularly those situated in contexts of temporary internal migration, are constructed in the Indian context. Drawing on ethnographic data from the city of Bangalore, this paper problematizes how dominant ideals around migration, childhood, and schooling frame migrant children’s lives through linear temporalities. Furthermore, the paper argues that policy interventions that ostensibly include migrant childhoods do not engage critically with the politics of linear temporality which, in turn, is central to the exclusionary dynamics of migrant children’s schooling.

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Childhood and time constitute key sites of regulation for nationalist authoritarian regimes. However, the influence of time on contemporary nationalist discourses of childhood located in the Global South remains an underresearched area. This paper critically analyzes two spectacles involving Hindu nationalist Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and secondary school students on the occasions of Teachers Day 2014 and 2015. Temporal language, markers, and symbols rooted in discourses of colonialism/Orientalism, Brahminical Hinduism, and capitalist development are deconstructed to show how nationalist constructions of childhood can penetrate deep into the everyday lives of particular children who are deemed worthy to serve their nation. The paper concludes by highlighting specific ways in which time and temporality are weaponized to reproduce and legitimize a social hierarchy of childhoods that is necessary to sustain Hindu ethno-religious nationalism.

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This paper draws on data from a qualitative study of youth climate activists in Cyprus to explore the notion of temporality implied in how youth interrogate intergenerational relations in the context of their struggle against climate change and the tensions therein. Acknowledging the structural age inequalities that limit their actions, youth activists drew on multiple temporal frames of present, future, and past to delineate a sense of urgency for action to prevent an irreversible catastrophe in the future and to forge a future of hope. In the process, they invited other/older generations to the climate struggle, an opening that came with expressions of ambivalence among some activists.

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This paper’s reading of a specific cultural artifact to emerge from children’s climate activism in contemporary Australia enacts an argument that children themselves can be seen to be redefining childhood and futurity through their climate activism and demonstrates how their placards are evidence of this. It argues that we as critical childhood scholars can follow their lead by uncovering the discourses that underpin their activist slogans. In doing so, we can set about contesting the limiting and disempowering discourses of childhood that would dismiss the very idea of children as political participants in the fight to save the planet.

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During the Cold War, linear and future-oriented temporalities were enforced to accelerate social transformation on both sides of the Iron Curtain. Despite efforts to control time by bracketing complex human conditions, children were routinely engaged in everyday activities that followed different rhythms. Building on Barbara Adam’s notion of timescapes and drawing on collective biography research, this article examines different temporal experiences through childhood memories of harvesting in a forest, a family garden, and a collective farm. These memories reveal emotionally intense—embodied and embedded—temporal experiences of children entangled within timescapes of multiple and sometimes contradictory dimensions of human and more-than-human times.

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Drawing on the concept of “pedagogies of time,” this article analyzes early literacy textbooks and our own childhood memories of temporal socialization in (post)Soviet Armenia, Georgia, and Latvia. While textbook analysis reveals purposeful socialization of children into modern linear timelines, memory stories interrupt these predetermined trajectories and shift attention toward multiple forms of temporalities that coexist alongside and entangle with each other. Using a speculative thought experiment, we “edit” a chronological timeline in one of the stories from early literacy textbooks as an attempt to simultaneously (re)write the dominant timespaces of socialist modernity and the way childhood appears there.

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This collective piece explores the philosophical, ontological, and epistemic potentials of analyzing the relations between childhood and time, proposing thought experiments and fieldwork analyses that release childhood from a linear temporality toward (modern) adulthood. Each experiment originating from the authors’ distinct scholarly positionings fractures “modern childhood” and its civilization project, built from the hegemony of linear, sequential, progressive, and principled time.

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Through registering the chronopolitics of Cypriot teenage antiauthoritarian activists, this article explores the antichronocratic labour of children as a way to engage with processes of degrowth and to create dissident everyday temporalities through which to build alternative communities and relations in the present. It is argued that paying attention to such labour unsettles the hegemonic temporality of linear development and the individualized child of capitalist modernity while also troubling the consequent individual character of agency that has been hegemonic in childhood studies thus far. Such attention must infuse research on childhood(s) in its attempt to decolonize childhood and related knowledge production.

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This paper outlines how the specific constraints of virtual communication technology have stirred new thinking around what kind of research and what knowledge is produced with babies. During Zoom sessions, the 2–4-month-old babies were frequently present but out of shot, or glimpsed as a small limb or movement or sound on the other side of the screen. The babies’ bodies, movements, and sounds exceeded the boundaries of the screen. Through a posthuman lens, presence, time, and agency unravel the Zoom screen as an active participant that interferes with what can happen in a shared present in a liminal space.