Call for papers. Special issue. Publication: First semester of 2027

ECHOES OF INTERSECTIONAL CHILDHOOD STUDIES IN THE CAPITALOCENO

Deadline for article submissions: October 31, 2026

The journal Sociedad e Infancias invites you to participate in a Special Issue that is part of the K Reporters project, Reassembling politics across children’s culture to scale intersectional pedagogies. Through the exploration of children’s cultures, as well as the policies implemented for their well-being in contemporary societies, K Reporters seeks to recognize children’s agency and learn from their creative survival strategies, particularly their ways of managing distress and conflict. Aligned to this, intersectionality applied to critical childhood studies is conceived as “a counter-hegemonic praxis that seeks to challenge and displace hegemonic whiteness in the naming and legitimating of particular kinds of politics, policy-making, and knowledge production” (Konstantoni and Emejulu, 2017, p. 8).

Childhood and adolescence are structured intersectionally. Multiple intersections construct a gendered, racialized/ethnified, classified, sexualized, and normalized childhood, contrasting with a global, universalist, and developmentalist view of childhood that ignores the diversity of children’s experiences and reduces their trajectory to biological and psychological developmental factors. Research within the framework of (new) childhood studies has aimed to empirically study and analytically describe this diversity of children's everyday worlds (Alanen, 2016). Thus, age, like gender, is considered a socially constructed difference that intersects with other power dynamics, and not merely an isolated variable. In fact, the relational concept of “generation”, which highlights the links between different age-based positions and the bridges to broader, historically situated age cohorts, is one of the driving forces in childhood studies (Thorne, 2004).

Childhood studies constitute a strategic field for the imagination in times of crisis. The “eco” [oîkos], constitutive of economics and ecology, lead us to question accumulation, surplus value, and infinite growth in order to rethink the world as home from a communal perspective. In the Capitalocene, the dynamics of racial capitalism, socio-ecological crises, and the precarization of life have naturalized social reproduction. Studying childhood in the Capitalocene signals our commitment to examining “capitalism as a situated, multi-species world-ecology of capital, power, and reproduction” (Moore, 2016, p. 94). This special issue seeks to “echo” [ēkhó] intersectional childhood studies in research, pedagogy, social intervention, and activism, where children and adolescents engage in politics. We seek creative and uncertain resonances that subvert the established order, and imagine, rehearse and scale collectively forms that revolutionize the society we inhabit.
In accordance with the current educational agenda, it is urgent to understand how children develop a culture of resilience and solidarity in (post-)conflict situations in order to understand their resistance and support strategies, their educational processes, and their culture of well-being in different regions of the world. The entanglements of intersectionality allow us to interpret childhood and adolescence from the multiple possibilities of being and inhabiting the world in the face of the oppressive systems that permeate them (Platero, 2013). Consequently, this special issue of Sociedad e Infancias will include contributions consisting of interdisciplinary analyses, essays, research reports, and professional practices related to the main themes that guide the K Reporters project, such as:

•Analysing the structures that generate inequality, allowing us to grasp the situated plurality of children's lives.
•Questioning the pedagogies, professional knowledge, and institutional architectures that shape contemporary childhood studies.
•Exploring methodologies capable of articulating children's subjectivities and resistance to inequalities of social class, race, and gender.
•Interpreting how the micro-level is interwoven with broader macro-socioeconomic, political, and ecological processes.
•Investigating how children and adolescents position themselves as indispensable agents for imagining more fair futures in a world marked by increasing crises.

References
Alanen, L. (2016). “Intersectionality” and other challenges to theorizing childhood. Childhood, 23(2), 157-161. DOI: 10.1177/0907568216631055

Castro, L. Rabello de (2021). Decolonizing child studies: development and globalism as orientalist perspectives. Third World Quarterly, 42(11), 2487-2504. DOI: 10.1080/01436597.2020.1788934

Konstantoni, K. y Emejulu, A. (2017). When intersectionality met childhood studies: The dilemmas of a travelling concept. Children’s Geographies, 17(1), 6-22. https://doi.org/10.1080/14733285.2016.1249824

Moore, J. W (Ed.) (2016). Anthropocene or capitalocene? Nature, history and the crisis of capitalism. Kairos PM.

Platero, L. (2013). Marañas con distintos acentos: género y sexualidad en la perspectiva interseccional. Encrucijadas. Revista Crítica de Ciencias Sociales, 5, 44-53.

Thorne, B. (2004). Theorizing age and other differences. Childhood, 11(4), 403-408. DOI: 10.1177/0907568204047103

Guidelines for submission
• Contributions written for in Spanish, Portuguese and English Will be accepted.
• Submission method: registration on the journal’s website http://revistas.ucm.es/index.php/SOCI
• Guidelines for authors: https://revistas.ucm.es/index.php/SOCI/about/submissions

Contact: Journal Secretariat: sociedadeinfancia@ucm.es

Sociedad e Infancias thanks all those who, as authors, reviewers, or advisors of the journal, are contributing to making it a reference for childhood studies, especially in the Ibero-American sphere.