Cultural Politics of Childhood and Youth

This work offers a comprehensive exploration of how childhood and youth are understood within contemporary social theory, emphasizing the major intellectual shifts that have transformed these fields over the past three decades. Moving beyond traditional developmental perspectives that portrayed children as passive recipients of socialization and youth as a brief transition to adulthood, the text draws on the “new social studies of childhood” and critical youth studies to argue that both childhood and youth are socially constructed categories. Rather than universal or biologically fixed stages, they are shaped by historical contexts, institutional arrangements, and unequal power relations.
Central to the analysis is the concept of cultural politics, which highlights how meanings, identities, and representations of children and young people are produced, circulated, and contested. The work demonstrates how media narratives, state policies, educational systems, and global market forces frame childhood and youth in contradictory ways—at times idealizing them as innocent and hopeful, and at other times depicting them as deviant, risky, or problematic. Such representations are shown to reflect broader ideologies of nationhood, gender, modernity, and economic productivity.
The text further underscores the importance of intersectionality, explaining how class, caste, race, gender, sexuality, disability, language, and nationality intersect to shape diverse and unequal experiences of growing up. It also examines the impact of globalization, neoliberal economic restructuring, migration, and digital technologies in reshaping young lives, generating both new opportunities and new vulnerabilities.
Importantly, the work foregrounds agency, emphasizing that children and youth actively negotiate, reinterpret, and sometimes resist structural constraints in everyday contexts. By integrating insights from sociology, education, psychology, and cultural studies, the volume advances an interdisciplinary, decolonial, and context-sensitive framework for understanding the complex realities of childhood and youth in contemporary societies.

Chandrabali Dutta is Assistant Professor and Head of the Department of Sociology at Hiralal Mazumdar Memorial College for Women, Dakshineswar, Kolkata. She is an alumnus of Presidency College, Kolkata, and holds her Post-Graduation and PhD from the University of Calcutta. With over 17 years of teaching experience, she has taught undergraduate courses extensively and has also been associated with postgraduate teaching at institutions such as the University of Calcutta, Jadavpur University, IISWBM, and Sister Nivedita University. Her academic interests include sociolinguistics, sociology of childhood, and sociology of gender. She has presented papers at numerous national and international conferences and has received Best Presentation Awards in 2016 and 2025. She is the author of one single-authored book, editor of three edited volumes, and has published several research articles in reputed national and international journals and edited collections. Her article in 'Social Science Gazetteer' earned the Golden Jubilee Year Young Social Scientist Award (2017) of the Indian Social Science Association. She is an active member of the Indian Sociological Society and the International Sociological Association, and serves as Secretary of the charitable organization Bandhu Foundation. She has completed a Minor Research Project sponsored by Eastern Regional Centre (ERC) of Indian Council of Social Science Research (ICSSR) from 2022 to 2023.

Lefranc Joseph is Professor of Sociology at the State University of Haiti, Visiting Professor of Sociology at the School of Sociological and Anthropological Studies at the University of Ottawa, and Senior Researcher at CHARESSO. His research examines city, education, language, and society. He is the author of 'Sociologie de Port-au-Prince' (forthcoming; English edition: 'A Sociology of Port-au-Prince') and editor of 'Urban Metabolism: The Social Life of Infrastructure in the Global South' (Vernon Press, forthcoming). He is founder and senior editor at Haiti University Press and editor of the journal 'Temporalités et Sociétés'.