Remains of Imperialism and Colonialism In Childhood Lives across the South

This session addresses how the long durée of imperialism and colonialism continues to shape childhood lives across Asia, Africa, Latin America, and Australia/Oceania. Rather than treating colonialism as a closed historical chapter, we approach it as an ongoing structure whose racial orders, extractive economies, missionary and humanitarian legacies, and pedagogical projects persist in the institutions, intimacies, and imaginaries that govern children's lives today.

The session would examine the racialisation and classification of children within colonial and post-colonial state systems; the afterlives of residential schooling, child removal, and assimilationist welfare; the role of international children's rights frameworks in reproducing — or contesting — colonial hierarchies; the continuities between extractivism, dispossession, and the foreclosure of Indigenous and racialised children's futures; and the cultural politics of childhood in contexts where colonial pasts remain unsettled.