Description
Building from recent work on childhood in IR, this paper approaches childhood not as a time of life but as a social imaginary and a cardinal category of identity/difference analogous to gender or race. Disaggregating children and childhood is a first critical step toward apprehending imagined childhood as a social technology of governance. To elaborate this, the paper works through three distinct but interrelated dimensions of how we might think about ‘the age of childhood’. The first of these points to how imagined childhood (disaggregated from children) belongs to a particular historical era (or age). The second acknowledges its defiance of chronological human age in the ways that, in the manner of its becoming a technology of governance, childhood is variously withheld (including from children) and ascribed (including to adults). The third reflects on the historical ‘age of childhood’ as also the historical age of other things (like advanced colonialism, for example) that have traded on imagined childhood at an ontological level. Taken together, these reflections reveal the meaning-making work of imagined childhood as a governance technology at all scales from the personal, to the local, to the global.
