Politics, Citizenship and Rights

This volume explores the political geographies of children and young people and aims to cement this research area within human geography and beyond. Indeed, the policies that specifically target young individuals and groups, and the politics in the everyday lives of children and youth across all scalar dimensions deserve broad attention. The book is structured in four sections with specific focus on the spatialities of the rights of the child, children and young people’s agency in politics, youthful practice as political resistance, and active youth citizenship. In the 28 chapters, a total of 43 authors based in 14 different countries explicate how issues of youthful citizenship, children’s rights, and children and young people's political agencies cross disciplinary, methodological and theoretical boundaries, with notable geographical variation. Particular attention falls on children and young people’s active roles in different kinds of political situations, environments, processes, and practices. The volume also emphasises that there is scope for future research, not least because of the shifting (geo)political landscapes across the globe.

Dr. Kirsi Pauliina Kallio is Research Fellow with the Academy of Finland, based at the University of Tampere Space and Political Agency Research Group (SPARG) that is part of the Centre of Excellence in Research on the Relational and Territorial Politics of Bordering, Identities and Transnationalization (RELATE). Major themes in her work are political subjectivity and agency, subject formation and spatial socialization, transnational children’s rights, children’s and young people’s political geographies, and lived citizenship. In her research, she seeks to develop theories of the subject, relational spatiality, and experiential politics, to create better understanding about human agency as contextually political. She has also worked extensively on the political significance of youthful agency. Dr. Kallio has published extensively in international human geography and childhood studies, including journal articles such as Subject, Action and Polis: Theorizing Political Agency (Progress in Human Geography), The Global as a Field: Children’s Rights Advocacy as a Transnational Practice (Environment and Planning D: Society and Space), Lived Citizenship as the Locus of Political Agency in Participatory Policy (Citizenship Studies), and Tracing Children’s Politics (Political Geography); edited collections Critical Political Geography (ACME), The Beginning of Politics (Routledge), Children and Young People’s Politics in Everyday Life (Space and Polity), and Transnational Lived Citizenship (Global Networks); as well as book chapters like Children’s Political Geographies (Companion to Political Geography), Intergenerational Recognition as Political Practice (Intergenerational Space), and Becoming Geopolitical in the Everyday World (Children, Young People and Critical Geopolitics). In her current research project “Political Presence as a Right of the Child,” she studies children’s and young people’s political realities in an international comparative setting.Dr. Sarah Mills is a Senior Lecturer in Human Geography based at the Department of Geography, Loughborough University, UK. Her central research interests revolve around the geographies of youth citizenship and informal education. She has explored the gendered citizenship projects and educational philosophies of several British youth movements across the twentieth century, including the Scout Movement, Girl Guides, Woodcraft Folk, and Jewish Lads’ Brigade. This research has been funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), Royal Geographical Society (with Institute of British Geographers), and Institute of Historical Research. Dr. Mills currently holds a ESRC Future Research Leaders award (2014–2017), which supports the research project A Rite of Passage? National Citizen Service and the Geographies of Youth Citizenship that aims to examine the state’s motivations behind, the voluntary sector’s engagement with, and young people’s experiences of Nat