Inspired by the Call for Papers put forth by Global Studies of Childhood, I reflected on this portion of the call:

“…by threading together ‘nation’ and ‘childhood’ as discursive constructions, both require considerable imaginative resources to understand our world and our relations within it (Steger, 2009). However, we know little about how children come to assume and inhabit national identities, and how national identity shapes what they do both as children and adults. Notions of ‘childhood’ and ‘nation’ shape how we understand our own childhood (memories of belonging to a nation), children’s worlds (possibly as political agents or citizens of a nation and / or globe) and children’s lives (as future or present citizens) and the premises upon which our belonging to a nation is constructed, and how those are entangled with the present and future of the ‘nation’ and a transnational world.”

Without active engagement both “the nation” and “childhood” could potentially remain in the realm of the private imaginary, these concepts are constituted through discursive constructions.  It is by activating upon the construct that “nationhood” is defined, contested, embodied, and projected.  What makes “the nation” real is when people act upon that notion, to produce and reproduce it.  Similarly, the notion of “childhood” is socially constructed by situating it against activities in time and space (James, Jenks & Prout. 1998). Children and childhood are constructions developed in dynamic transactions with their local settings.  Rarely do children have the opportunity to interact with their nation, at the national level or across national spaces (if anything, children’s online engagement with virtual spaces are likely to set their activity and cultural development in global spaces within linguistic, technological, and interest communities).  Rather, children and childhood should be studied with the social, cultural, environmental  and political contexts of their every day development.

The political culture of childhood, as informed by children themselves, is developed through their active engagement with political cultures.  The approach to studying the children’s political culture first requires us to place the scale of childhood studies within the ecology of children’s daily interactions, by this I mean their lived realities at home, at school, and in their communities.  This is not to discount the ability of children to be globally minded.  In fact, we are often inspired by the activism of children who empathize with the oppression faced by people very different from themselves, and for causes that arguably do not directly impact upon their daily lives.  Rather, children’s political engagement is within what Bronfenbrenner calls their microsystems and mesosystems, with people, groups , and institutions that they interact with directly, and between each other (1979).

Secondly, the children’s political culture is developed through their active engagement with political culture.  The respect for children as political actors has consistently been undervalued in part due to erroneous judgements of their competencies which then precludes them from developing their political skills through experiential learning.  Reports of children’s understanding of the political system, and the roles of citizens in it superficially portrays children as ignorant passive empty vessels, mirroring antiquated perspectives of childhood.  Children’s limited and stunted understanding of the political environment and the mechanisms to participate in it are due to their restricted activity within the political sphere of their communities, let alone at the national level.  While childhood studies have moved forward to recognize children as active agents of their own development and the development of their communities, the promulgation of children’s as political agents still lags.

If we are interested in developing children as political actors at the level that matters to them most, their communities, then we must engage children in the governance of their communities.  The active participation of children in the planning and implementation of projects to develop their communities will not only lead to communities that are responsive to the needs of all citizens, inclusive of those who do not vote, but foster children who understand and see the value of fostering citizenship and democracy, those very values promulgated by the imaginary “nation.”  The engagement of children as political actors in the governance of their communities is the mechanism by which we build not only national child-citizens, but community-embedded, engaged democratic global citizens. By recognizing and supporting the agency of children as political actors, we move the constructs of “the nation” and “childhood” from the imaginary into the real shared spaces of collaborative social development.