(Im)possible conversations? activism, childhood and everyday life

Abstract

The paper offers an analytical exploration and points of connection between the categories of activism, childhood and everyday life. We are concerned with the lived experiences of activism and childhood broadly defined and especially with the ways in which people become aware, access, orient themselves to, and act on issues of common concern; in other words what connects people to activism. The paper engages with childhood in particular because childhood remains resolutely excluded from practices of public life and because engaging with activism from the marginalized position of children’s everyday lives provides an opportunity to think about the everyday, lived experiences of activism. Occupying a space ‘before method’, the paper engages with autobiographical narratives of growing up in the Communist left in the USA and the historical events of occupying Greek schools in the 1990s. These recounted experiences offer an opportunity to disrupt powerful categories currently in circulation for thinking about activism and childhood. Based on the analysis it is argued that future research on the intersections of activism, childhood and everyday life would benefit from exploring the spatial and temporal dimension of activism, to make visible the unfolding biographical projects of activists and movements alike, while also engaging with the emotional configurations of activists’ lives and what matters to activists, children and adults alike.

Play as activism? Early childhood and (inter)generational politics

“…Rather than assuming a priori which sites, modes, and speech count as political, Kallio and Häkli (2011) argue that we should begin by looking at children's experiences and lived worlds with these understandings in mind. The turn to children's politics has also prompted examination of young people's activism, with Nolas, Varvantakis, and Aruldoss (2016) staging an "(im)possible conversation" across these categories and pointing to a view of activism as both contesting the status quo and prefiguring new social relations, and likewise both the potential for action and action itself.…”

“…I tread a cautious path between denying play a space within/as activism and broadening definitions of activism to include everything and anything. This intervention speaks with, but also against, accounts critical of the ways in which 'activism', which broadly speaking can be understood as collective efforts at transformation actualised through political agency (Nolas et al, 2016), has been reduced to the spectacular, the programmatic, the national or global; separated from people's quotidian lives; and tied to self-aware intentionality. Indeed, there have been various attempts to question the boundaries between activism and the everyday, opening up the tenor and type of action typically considered activist by both social scientists and participants in social movements (Martin, Hanson, & Fontaine, 2007).…”

“…In bracketing the 'inter' of intergenerational, I seek to keep two slightly different points in view. First, this construction nods to the possibility of thinking 'intergenerationally' about activism, moving political contestation out of an adult-only realm and stressing the importance of social memories across generations in forging political solidarities (Nolas et al, 2016). Second, I highlight the necessity of contesting generational orders which reify a sharp binary between childhood and adulthood; essentialise 'the child', ascribing her/him with, often deficit, characteristics, normative activities such as the contemporary bourgeois conflation of play and childhood, and marginal social status; and lead to the subordination of children, inter alia, as a generational group.…”

Talking politics in everyday family lives

“…Established literature on identity and social categorisation demonstrate unequivocally that younger children (5-6 years) display the tendencies to respond politically to the world around them as they navigate social-group categories and identities of gender, race, and ethnicity (Bennett & Sani, 2003cited in Sapiro, 2004Lloyd & Duveen, 1990), as well as the inequalities and injustices that such differences often entail. At the same time biographies and autobiographies of people who have been civically and politically active, committed to publicly engaging with issues of common concern during their lifetime, suggest that encounters with public life can and do happen early (Andrews, 1997;Nolas et al, 2016). As such, in the Connectors Study we recruited children who were between 5 and 8 years old at the time of joining the study.…”

“…The paper addresses the ERC-funded Connectors Study's concern with the relationship between childhood and public life, and how an orientation towards social action emerges (or not) in childhoods that are located in different national cultural contexts, over time, and during a historical moment of global economic precarity (Nolas, 2015;Nolas, Varvantakis, & Aruldoss, 2016). The analysis draws on three family histories composed through longitudinal ethnographic research carried out between 2014 and 2016 with families living in Athens (Greece), Hyderabad (India), and London (England).…”