Children's Narratives, Icons, and Representations across Artefacts and Technology

Children's Narratives, Icons, and Representations Across Artefacts and Technology - Open Session

Childhood, adolescence, and youth have long been represented through and bound to artefacts: toys, leisure items, printed media, and more recently digital technologies such as games, films, and platforms. These artefacts do more than accompany children's lives. They sign, embrace, and limit access to childhood, marking who counts as a child and what childhood should be. The genderfication of toys, the circulation of icons of the innocent or the endangered child, and the current wave of measures barring adolescents from social media, framing it as a no-child zone, all police the boundaries of childhood. Such movements work as forms of norm entrepreneurship and settle into shared social representations that travel across markets, media, and policy.

This session invites theoretical and empirical contributions on how artefacts and technologies co-produce notions and visions of childhood, and on how these notions turn turbulent when regulation, crisis, and moral panic reshape the child's relation to technology. We draw on social representations theory, science and technology studies, the sociology of childhood, and scholarship on icons and imaginaries to ask how representations of childhood are made, contested, and undone. We particularly welcome comparative and decolonial perspectives that decentre the Global North, examine how global childhoods are assembled through circulating artefacts, and treat children as actors who interpret and contest the representations imposed on them.