E.02. Children as Political Actors: Rethinking School, Agency, and Democracy

Abstract

This panel explores how children often act as political subjects within and beyond school, and how their participation, resistance, and everyday negotiations invite new ways of understanding democracy. Rather than viewing children as adults and citizens "in-waiting", we emphasize the diverse ways they already engage with power through dialogue, collective action and activism, subtle forms of resistance or subversiveness, and practices of meaning making. These actions challenge assumptions that political agency emerges only with maturity and reveal schools as contested spaces where democratic capacities are reproduced, constrained and, potentially, reimagined.

Schools operate within hierarchical, surveillance-driven, and neoliberal structures that often privilege compliance and, at times, inequality. They also contain possibilities for agency, solidarity, and democratic expression. Children’s responses, ranging from everyday infrapolitics to activism, highlight capacity to interpret, contest, and reshape their social worlds. Moreover, participatory and dialogic approaches to learning can open spaces where intergenerational relations become more reciprocal, enabling children to articulate concerns and analyse conditions.

The panel invites contributions that expand the democratic imaginary to include children as active co-participants in civic life. We welcome papers from education studies, childhood studies, sociology, political philosophy, anthropology, psychology, social policy, critical pedagogy, occupational science, and related interdisciplinary fields, drawing on theory, empirical research, or policy analysis. The panel aligns with the themes such as as Childhood, Citizenship & Social and Cultural Justice, Pedagogical Practices, Democratic Participation & School Governance, as it stresses children’s political agency and the democratisation of schooling.