Childhood Publics
Authors: Nolas Sevasti-Melissa 
Published: October 2024

Childhood publics are the ways in which children are connected through issues of common care and concern and the processes of mediation that can connect children and give these issues a broader audience. The term “childhood publics” came to the fore with the publication of Children’s Participation, Childhood Publics, and Social Change: A Review, cited under Children and the Public Sphere. Publics, a key phenomenon of modernity, emerge in everyday life and at the margins of institutional life and the market. In childhood, this might bring researchers to focus on the peripheries of schooling and of family life, the settings and times of leisure and play both in person and online, and/or the in-between-institutional times and spaces, such as walking to and from school or a friend’s place, when children themselves may be left largely to their own devices, with little to no adult supervision and input. Finding such spaces and times is itself a challenge, and it might be that childhood publics is only ever partial and/or relies on intergenerational solidarities. For example, younger children are far more dependent on an adult presence and mediated by adult interlocutors, because childhood and youth itself as increasingly instrumentalized and the spaces and times for idling, boredom, daydreaming, meandering, plotting, alone and together, have shrunk considerably within the family (children’s, especially middle-class children’s, timetables are full with extracurricular activities), but also because the funding for public infrastructures which all children, but especially those from lower-income families, might access in order to congregate (e.g., youth centers) has steadily declined in postindustrialized societies. Concerns over children’s safety in cities, children’s restricted access to their own income and availability, and age restrictions on places where children could meet all mean that meeting places like streets and squares and cafes, traditional locations of publics formation, might need to be rethought in childhood publics. Children are also vastly underrepresented and under-researched as cultural producers. At the same time, a range of online spaces have emerged where some publics formation can take place, although again, such spaces may pose (typically, age) restrictions on younger children; safety over their use is also an issue. Developing an understanding of publics requires unpacking the relationship between public and private, the personal and the political, as well as modes and media of connection in children’s lives both in person and online, all of which are covered in this article. There is also a key question of how adult interlocutors might understand and act on children’s speech acts and other forms of expression. Finally, as a phenomenon of modernity much of the initial literature on the topic has been written with a Western context in mind. This does not mean that publics do not exist outside the postindustrialized democracies; instead it is a reminder to be mindful of their historical and cultural specificity of writing and research on the topic and to be sensitive to local variations. The entry starts by introducing key readings on publics, followed by historical and contemporary examples of childhood publics, before proceeding to cover analytical dimensions of childhood publics and closing with an overview of publics-creating methodologies with children. The entry has been written with a global childhood publics in mind, and where available and accessible, international examples have been included.