Book Description

"Democracy's Child places young people at the heart of pivotal conflicts, decisions and transformations in American politics. From the March for Our Lives and Black Lives Matter, to Gay Straight Alliances and the Dreamer and Sunrise movements, the prominence of young people as agents of change are unmistakable in contemporary political life. Yet as Gash and Tichenor show, these movements reflect a long history of youth political mobilization and leadership, including Progressive Era labor organizing and 1960s civil rights and anti-war activism. Children also are crucial subjects of government and adult control, inspiring contention in nearly every realm of public policy, such as education, social welfare, abortion, gun control, immigration, civil rights and liberties, and criminal justice. And young people are regularly leveraged in political life as influential symbols of innocence and deviance, or treated as political collateral (as the spectacle of "kids in cages" under the Trump administration's "family separation" policy vividly captures). In a narrative that ranges from history and law to young adult literature, Democracy's Child reveals why the control, leveraging, and agency of young people shapes and defines our political landscape. Along the way, readers learn about age or childhood as a concrete difference that combines with gender, race, class, immigration status, or sexual orientation to produce powerful systems of privilege or disadvantage"--