Childhood, Agency, and Fantasy

Childhood, Agency, and Fantasy: Walking in Other Worlds draws on childhood studies scholarship to contextualize children’s agentic entanglements with fantasy. Fantasy offers children opportunities for greater peer connectivity, identity exploration, holistic citizenry, and creative empowerment.

Joining the emergent interdisciplinary investment in bridging the social sciences and the humanities, Childhood, Agency, and Fantasy: Walking in Other Worlds explores linkages between children’s agency and fantasy. Fantasy as an integral aspect of childhood and as a genre allows for children’s 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 children’s agency, wherein children’s beings and becomings, rooted in childhood’s freedoms and constraints, result in a range of outcomes. In the endeavor to broaden theory and research on children’s agency, fantasy becomes a point of possibility with its expanding subjectivities, far-reaching terrain, and spirit of adventure.

Adventure/Otherworld

1-Where Do We Belong? Childhood Studies, Agency, Citizenry, and Fantasy – Ingrid E. Castro

Dream/Good vs. Evil

2-A Futile Rage against the Machine: The Triumph of The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T – Peter W.Y. Lee

Imagination/Transformation

3-Developing Children’s Agency through Play with Imaginary Companions – Kostas Magos and Sophia Kremmydiotou

Heroism/Supernatural

4-Arcadia is in the Hands of Teenagers: Team Power in Guillermo del Toro’s Trollhunters – Tara Moore

Magic/Journey

5-The Boy Who Lives: Agentic Locations of Friendship Identity, Peer Culture, and Interpretive Reproduction in Harry Potter – Ingrid E. Castro

Mythology/Quest

6-All in the Family: The Agency of Demigods and Godlings in the Mythic World of Rick Riordan – Michele D. Castleman

Conflict/Justice

7-Young People’s Agency in Online Fan Spaces – Parinita Shetty

Portals/Time

8-Girls’ Agency through Supermobility: The Power of Imagined Futures in Young Adult Fantasy Literature – Ida Fadzillah Leggett

Movement/Power

9-Being Scared in the Dark: Paradoxes, Perils, and the Promise of Fantasy for Urban Girls of Color – Ingrid E. Castro and Ana Lilia Campos-Manzo