Figuring the Future

Child laborers in South Asia, child soldiers in Sierra Leone and Uganda, Chinese youth playing computer games to earn virtual gold, youth involved in sex trafficking in the former Soviet republics and Thailand: these are just some of the young people featured in the news of late. The idea that young people are more malleable and the truisms that youth are the future or children are our hope for the future give news stories and scholarly accounts added meaning. To address how and why youth and children have come to seem so important to globalization, the contributors to this book look at the both the spatial relations and the temporal dimensions of globalization in places as far apart as Oakland, California, and Tamatave, Madagascar, in situations as disparate as the idealization of childhood innocence and the brutal lives of street children. Discourses of, and practices by, youth and children, from the design of toys to political mobilization, are critical sites through which people everywhere conceive of, produce, contest, and naturalize the new futures."