Childhood, Agency, and Fantasy

Joining the emergent interdisciplinary investment in bridging the social sciences and the humanities, Childhood, Agency, and Fantasy: Walking in Other Worlds explores linkages between childrens agency and fantasy. Fantasy as an integral aspect of childhood and as a genre allows for childrens spectacular dreams and hopeful realities. Friendship, family, identity, loyalty, belongingness, citizenry, and emotionality are central concepts explored in chapters that are anchored by humanities texts of television, film, and literature, but also by social science qualitative methods of participant observation and interviews. Fantasy has the capacity to be a revolutionary change agent that in its modernity can creatively reflect, critique, or reimagine the social, political, and cultural norms of our world. Such promise is also found to be true of childrens agency, wherein childrens beings and becomings, rooted in childhoods freedoms and constraints, result in a range of outcomes. In the endeavor to broaden theory and research on childrens agency, fantasy becomes a point of possibility with its expanding subjectivities, far-reaching terrain, and spirit of adventure.