An interview with Matthew Benwell, Spyros Spyrou, and Eleni Theodorou about their edited book, Children, Young People and the Future
Our members, Matthew Benwell (Newcastle University, UK), Spyros Spyrou (European University Cyprus), and Eleni Theodorou (European University Cyprus), talk about their edited book, Children, Young People and the Future (Routledge, 2026).
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Q: What is this edited collection about?
Our book, Children, Young People and the Future, explores the intersections between children, childhood, youth, and the future and provides critical understandings of how the future is imagined, conceptualised, enlisted, used, negotiated, and manipulated to serve diverse political ends and social imaginaries. It foregrounds the value and utility of the notion of the future as it manifests in the daily lives of children and young people, as well as conceptually in the scholarly discussions and debates which are currently unfolding around this concept and the temporalities of childhood and youth.
The book enriches understandings of how children and youth imagine, create, and enact their futures and of the ways in which their futures and presents are mutually constituted and intertwined. Going beyond simplistic and stereotypical identifications of children and young people with the future, this edited book presents empirical and theoretical discussions of childhood/youth and the future with a view to offering a deeper and more nuanced understanding of these intersections.
The book engages with multiple disciplines including anthropology, sociology, geography, childhood studies, youth studies and more. It presents chapters from diverse socio-political and geographical contexts spanning Africa, Asia, Europe, North and South America, and foregrounds diverse and often marginalised childhoods (indigenous, displaced, precarious, queer etc.), showcasing experiences, aspirations and future imaginings that speak back to normative framings of the future.
Q: What made you initiate this volume?
The three of us as editors have been working and thinking with notions of the future in relation to children and young people for some time. But we also felt that these ideas were not sufficiently problematized in the literature despite the recent interest by scholars in Childhood Studies and Children’s Geographies about time and the temporalities of childhood and youth.
At the same time, we felt that the future as a temporal condition holds a lot of promise for helping rethink both theoretically and methodologically these fields and that a larger and more intentional conversation would have to take place. We thought that bringing together work around these issues in an edited volume would facilitate a critical dialogue around the notion of the future, showcase some of the exciting work centred around it, and offer fruitful ways forward.
The large number of submissions we received following the call for papers confirmed that the future is already a concern for many childhood and youth scholars and that we should expect that this will become a much more central discussion in the years to come. Our edited volume is one collective contribution towards this direction.
An excerpt from the introductory chapter:
The future animates life in a forward-looking manner orienting us towards the unknown, to that which is yet-to-be. It sometimes inspires hope and the promise of something better, while sometimes it creates anxiety or a sense of fear about the unknown. Ultimately, the future retains a degree of uncertainty and unpredictability (even if quite often we anticipate our immediate futures with a relative sense of certainty). Quite often, this unpredictability about the future creates a desire to know it, understand it, and, if possible, control it. Above all, the future impacts in tangible ways our lives in the present through the orientations we have towards it: one is propelled to act in the present based on an imagined future, to make things happen in the present either to enhance the possibilities for bringing about desired futures or to decrease the likelihood of undesirable ones. In that sense, and while discussions surrounding the future as an abstract temporal condition often refer to it in the singular, it is useful to remember that when referring to specific manifestations of the future, it is more appropriate to refer to multiple futures as these unfold in the realm of the personal, the communal, the national, and the global.
As a temporal condition, the future is often implicated in discussions surrounding children, childhood, and youth (Evans and Honeyford, 2012; Horton and Kraftl, 2006; Gidley and Inayatullah, 2002; Giroux 2013). Quite often children and young people are identified with the future and especially with the notion of hope, most often heard in colloquial expressions such as “children are the future” or “we have hope in young people” (Kraftl, 2008). Though in recent years, there has been more scholarly attention in the social sciences on the future as a substantive concept which needs to be sufficiently unpacked and critiqued in all its complexity (see Anderson, 2010; Bryant and Knight, 2019; Cook, 2019; Dekeyser, 2022; Jeffrey and Dyson, 2021; MacLeavy et al., 2021; Salazar et al., 2017), work which explores its utility for the study of children, childhood, and youth has been relatively underdeveloped until recently. Most scholarly work on childhood, for example, continues to foreground the present conditions of children’s lived experiences, while the putative abstractness, uncertainty, and unpredictability of the future (Anderson, 2010) contribute to the relative lack of engagement with its theoretical and methodological potential. Any concern with children/young people and the future needs to remain aware of the risks and dangers of positioning children and youth as future adults by overlooking their rights in the present (Evans, 2010; see also Uprichard, 2008), but to avoid a critical engagement with the future as a temporal condition which shapes and is shaped by children and youth in the present is to downplay the critical role of temporalities in their lives.
The book is organised into three themes – (a) temporalising the future; (b) living uncertain futures; and (c) imagining alternative futures. It includes chapters which are theoretical/conceptual as well as empirical, and its contributions adopt an interdisciplinary approach, drawing from a variety of fields ranging from childhood and youth studies to sociology, geography, and anthropology. The 14 chapters explore the theme of the book through different perspectives, fields, and methods, and with a broad geographical representation from across the world. The chapters foreground in particular diverse and often marginalised childhoods (indigenous, displaced, precarious, queer, etc.) showcasing youth experiences, aspirations, and future imaginings that speak back to normative framings of the future. As a whole, this collection aims to enrich understandings of how children and youth imagine, create, and enact their futures and of the ways in which their futures and presents are mutually constituted and intertwined. This introduction and the 14 chapters which comprise the volume seek to contribute to the emerging social science literature on the future which, we argue, could benefit from knowledge developed in childhood and youth studies and inform this wider literature with more nuanced insights and perspectives.