Refusing to Grow Old: The Antichronocratic Labour of Cypriot Activist Youth and What It Can Teach Us About Decolonizing Childhood and Related Knowledge Production

Georgina Christou

doi:10.18357/jcs202320467

Georgina Christou University of Cyprus https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3964-6645

DOI: https://doi.org/10.18357/jcs202320467

Keywords: temporality, degrowth, decolonization, youth activism, everyday

Abstract

Through registering the chronopolitics of Cypriot teenage antiauthoritarian activists, this article explores the antichronocratic labour of children as a way to engage with processes of degrowth and to create dissident everyday temporalities through which to build alternative communities and relations in the present. It is argued that paying attention to such labour unsettles the hegemonic temporality of linear development and the individualized child of capitalist modernity while also troubling the consequent individual character of agency that has been hegemonic in childhood studies thus far. Such attention must infuse research on childhood(s) in its attempt to decolonize childhood and related knowledge production.

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