Childhood and the Unequal Distribution of Futures

Sociology of childhood has, from the outset, distinguished itself as intent on understanding children as agents in the present – not simply human becomings. In the last decade, however, some have called for a revision of the field’s relationship with temporality, not least by signalling children’s own preoccupations with the future. Yet some of this scholarship, despite its focus on children’s climate activism, breeds a sense that there is no future at all, and certainly no common horizon, be this for the planet or for children in ‘edge’ populations. In this paper, we respond to the diffuse problems posed by this literature examining the ways the young make futures in difficult and uncertain circumstances. We enter this debate with an ethnographic approach to the everyday lives of children in villas in Argentina and unaccompanied migrant children in England with two goals. First, we consider the complex emotional, moral, and material texture of futures which animate life from the point of view of our young interlocutors. Second, we argue that there is at once a profoundly unequal distribution of futures in late capitalist, neo-colonial contexts but that imaginaries and futuring practices are complexly articulated, such that while futures are overdetermined, transformations cannot be precluded. Our goal is to avoid the binarism of either a radically open future or a futureless apocalyptic horizon, while keeping alive ethnographic insights about the relationship between hope, aspirational normativity, and the materiality of the reproduction of life in contexts fraught with inequality. While pointing to the unequal distribution of futures, we nonetheless hold on to the possibility of a future at all, where such futures may be different from the grossly unequal present, instead of condemning political imaginaries and practices to a repetition or degradation of present-day conditions.