This introductory chapter offers an overview of current concepts and research approaches relevant to young people’s negotiations of their geopolitical contexts, including their embodied, located, and grounded experiences. Moreover, highlighting the connections between national and transcultural, transnational, and global studies, as well as activism and citizenship, it suggests the relevance of children’s and young adult literature to geopolitical situatedness as framing children’s agency through its socializing, decolonizing, and educating potentials. Finally, it provides an overview of the chapters in the volume and outlines further areas of study at the intersections of children’s and young adult literature scholarship and the field of geopolitics.

Looking back at the three decades of Ukraine’s regained independence demonstrates that the country’s road to building a civil society has been turbulent. Between 1991 and 2023 Ukraine had two major revolutions which were the aftermath of electoral fraud and the controversial decision of President Viktor Yanukovych to strengthen ties with Russia by refusing to sign the European Union — Ukraine Association Agreement. The latter was followed by Russia’s annexation of Crimea and the ongoing war, which escalated in early 2022, contributing to the deaths of thousands of people, including children, and the country. The three events led to decommunization, revaluation of historical memory, and the blossoming of civil society. This chapter showcases that in the last thirty years citizenship and agency have gradually become important topics in Ukrainian culture, including children’s and young adult literature. Studying two historical novels published after 2014, the author demonstrates how selected Ukrainian writers approach the matters of active citizenship and agency by highlighting the importance of history and education in the process.

This chapter explores child language activism as a form of geopolitical agency through a close critical content analysis of a dual language picturebook from Aotearoa New Zealand (ANZ), Te Kōtiro Nohinohi e Noho Patata Ana (The Small Girl Who Lives Next Door 2022). Language activists are groups or individuals who strive to protect their rights to use their languages in a range of places and contexts. In ANZ there is a rich history of language activism supporting the revitalization of ANZ’s Indigenous language, te reo Māori. Through the lens of language activism, this chapter explores how the text and image of picturebooks can represent a form of “quiet” but powerful language activism led by children in a personal sphere. It offers a case study for the ways in which cultural heritage may be preserved, showing that the benefit of engaging with new knowledge, world views and language is the path to agency for the child protagonists in this story, and by extension for readers as future language activists.

Representations of children in literature for children have always reflected the roles that children are seen to have in their local contexts. From the late twentieth century, in Canadian children’s literature, many children have been depicted as political and social actors with agency of their own whose actions can lead to positive change, whether within their own family, amongst their friends, at their schools, or within society more widely. This chapter considers how Canadian children’s literature has increasingly depicted children as having agency in their own lives. It will explore this increase in represented agency from multiple perspectives, from the invitation to agential reading made in postmodern picturebooks like Mélanie Watt’s Chester (2007) to the trans/queer agencies of Kai Cheng Thom’s From the Stars in the Sky to the Fish in the Sea (2017) and the networked resistance to bullying shown in Susin Nielsen’s We Are All Made of Molecules (2015). The chapter also considers how Indigenous children’s books encourage readers to become geopolitical agents through its consideration of Cherie Dimaline’s The Marrow Thieves (2017), which not only encourages readers’ privileging of multiple perspectives and “coming-to” stories but also centers an anticolonial Indigenous (geo)politics for our times.

Established during World War II on the model of the Soviet Pioneer Organization, the Union of Pioneers of Yugoslavia cultivated socialist and patriotic values through extracurricular activities and collaboration with schools. Pioneers were expected to embody solidarity, brotherhood, collectivism, and loyalty to Tito. Yet childhood within this framework was neither uniform nor static: it navigated tensions between reproducing existing power structures and exercising agency that could challenge them. Seen through a global and transnational lens, Yugoslav childhood emerges as fluid, hybrid, and mobile, crossing geographic, cultural, and ideological borders while engaging in broader imaginaries of activism and socialist citizenship. Depictions of pioneer characters in war novels illustrate how children were imagined as political actors whose subjectivities developed across national and international discourses. Drawing on Bakhtin’s notion of dialogism, the chapter highlights the polyphony of voices — oscillating between conformity, activism, and resistance — that constituted socialist childhood. Situating these experiences at the intersection of politics, literature, and transnational flows, the analysis presents children as active agents rather than passive recipients of ideology.

This chapter assesses the ways in which Palestinian children’s literature has represented and promoted identity and belonging in a context in which national rights remain unrealized and both children and those who write for them face displacement, migration, and occupation, with all the resultant privations. Within this context, identity takes on multinational and transnational dimensions while simultaneously reflecting domestic experience in which national rights and sovereign powers remain painfully abstract. Palestinian children’s literature has evolved over time, most notably since the establishment of Israel in 1948, with the experiences of those within Israel, those in the West Bank and Gaza, and those scattered across the Arab world and beyond, leading to some shared but also increasingly diverse themes in literature for the young. Palestinian children’s literature writers have tried to reflect trauma but also (re)affirm unifying values, drawing on folklore and the past, on notions of “land” and “homeland”, and on steadfastness when historical forces have splintered Palestinians’ sense of belonging in Israel, in the Occupied Territories, and in the diaspora.

This chapter delves into the spatiality and geopolitics of Muslim girlhood within the narratives of Marzieh Meshkini’s The Day I Became a Woman (2000) and Fawzia Afzal-Khan’s Lahore with Love: Growing Up with Girlfriends, Pakistani-Style (2010), against religio-patriarchal backdrops in Pakistan and Iran, offering a nuanced understanding of the agential and political potential of Muslim girlhood. By highlighting the protagonists’ playful engagement with hudood laws, it illustrates their navigation and subversion of these laws as both legal and metaphorical barriers, contextualizing play as a mechanism that both sustains and critiques geopolitical agendas and imaginations and offers resistance to examine “school” and “household” as dual spaces of confinement and liberation.

This chapter explores a series of anti-corruption children’s books that emerged in post-authoritarian Indonesia. With over 150 titles since 2016, these books, identified by the Berani Jujur Hebat (Honesty is Bravery) label, position children as “becomings” rather than “beings”, emphasizing socialization into ideal citizenship. Among these, sixteen picturebooks portray child agency within didactic narratives, showcasing children navigating moral dilemmas independently while adults take passive roles. This chapter explores selected anti-corruption books, drawing on Weikle-Mills’s concept of “imaginary citizens” (2013) and Beauvais’s The Mighty Child: Time and Power in Children’s Literature (2015). It argues that these books shape children as “imaginary citizens”, instilling societal adherence without direct political engagement, yet empowering the “mighty child” to challenge adult authority and transform the future.

The chapter reads A Bend in Time: Writings by Children on the COVID-19 Pandemic (2020) to examine literature written by youth as a political act and a reclamation of their literary space, in this case by urban children who use their privilege and voice to comment on social issues of climate change, poverty, and healthcare. They display a diverse and widely ranging vision with a developing sense of activism, particularly at such a historic time as the pandemic. Building on this, I propose, that they also draw their own definitions of nation and inclusive nationhoods. This chapter considers the role of adults in creating space for agentic youth to reimagine the nation, in its ongoing present and its possible future, in crisis time. The dynamics of allyship shared between the adult publishers and the child authors are examined through publisher interviews and are read as an act of collective and inter-generational resistance against hegemonies in traditional children’s publishing in post-Independence India, where children were recipients of nationalistic ideologies.

A waterway of major geopolitical and environmental importance, the Nile River also has special historical/cultural, material, and spiritual significance in the Egyptian psyche, which in turn offers a vital foundation for cultivating eco-citizenship and ecoliteracy in young people. This chapter focuses on a selection of picturebooks produced during the new wave in Egyptian children’s literature (2000–2020), which focus on the Nile River, asking how these texts promote environmental understanding. Drawing on Greta Gaard’s three kinds of ecoliteracy necessary for developing an ecopedagogy, the analysis examines the books’ capacity to foster an emotional bond with nature, advance bioregional environmental literacy, and equip children with critical skills for ecocritical engagement. This chapter also examines how contemporary environmental discourses, particularly those concerning the Nile River, shape childhood in Egypt, assessing the child’s agency in addressing ecological challenges.

This chapter examines the representation of LGBTIQA+ individuals and same-sex families in Russian children’s and young adult literature, focusing on the coming-of-age novel Дни нашей жизни (The Days of Our Lives, 2020) by Mikita Franko. Set against the state’s legislative backdrop of homophobia, Franko’s novel offers a poignant autobiographical perspective on the challenges faced by Russia’s LGBTIQA+ community. Analyzing the novel through the prism of queer children’s literature, the study draws parallels with real-life experiences of children from Russian same-sex families. It highlights the power of young adult literature to act as a form of protest and identity expression, emphasizing its role in altering societal perception, fostering acceptance of the LGBTIQA+ community and countering the dominant cultural and political narratives in Russia.

Childhood studies underwent a transformative shift in the 1980s, when scholars challenged the prevailing developmental perspective viewing children as preparing for adulthood. Recognizing children as socially constructed agents, this shift nevertheless oversimplifies agency as an intrinsic trait of individuals, neglecting its dependencies on geopolitical, sociocultural, and material contexts. Drawing on new materialism, this study explores the agencies of three young adults — William Kamkwamba, Xiuhtezcatl Martinez, and Greta Thunberg — through the readings of their life writings. In addition to tracing how their agencies emerge through networks of human and non-human forces, it examines how they are narratively constructed and performed through their life writings. This approach encourages a reconsideration of agency beyond human subjects, offering insights into how diverse contexts and forces both limit and empower individuals.

Inclusive children’s literature is vital. Books can shape how young readers from socially marginalized backgrounds see themselves as well as how readers from dominant groups see and understand diversity. This chapter presents results of our cross-cultural, interdisciplinary research project, which explored the role of inclusive children’s literature in empowering teachers and readers in understanding social justice issues. Our project focused on books for 8–11-year-olds, which is a critical period in academic development, and one where there is often a decline in children reading for pleasure. Through our project, we engaged with Scottish and German teachers, student teachers, and pupils in an interactive inquiry into reading for pleasure. We could thus better understand how primary school teachers curate and engage with inclusive books, increasing the potential to foster critique of cultural imperialism and exclusionary master narratives by creating stronger and more equitable learning platforms.

This chapter explores epistemic injustices in the field of children’s literature research and its teaching practices in higher education. It argues that children’s ways of knowing are systematically marginalized in academic settings due to adultist and Eurocentric knowledge structures. The discussion is framed in childhood studies and posthumanist critiques, which have problematized the exclusion of children as epistemic agents. Three key exclusions are analyzed: the disregard for children’s contributions to literary discourse, the privileging of canonical literary culture over other media formats, and the dominance of universal aesthetic frameworks that obscure geopolitical and linguistic diversities. The chapter examines how scholarly knowledge reinforces epistemological hierarchies and proposes an “ethics of discomfort” to challenge these structures. It advocates for more porous and reciprocal research and teaching practices, where children’s cultural productions are explored beyond adultist and colonial frameworks. Ultimately, this chapter calls for a rethinking of the field, moving toward an inclusive, decolonial, and relational practice of children’s literature scholarship.

This introductory chapter offers an overview of current concepts and research approaches relevant to young people’s negotiations of their geopolitical contexts, including their embodied, located, and grounded experiences. Moreover, highlighting the connections between national and transcultural, transnational, and global studies, as well as activism and citizenship, it suggests the relevance of children’s and young adult literature to geopolitical situatedness as framing children’s agency through its socializing, decolonizing, and educating potentials. Finally, it provides an overview of the chapters in the volume and outlines further areas of study at the intersections of children’s and young adult literature scholarship and the field of geopolitics.

Looking back at the three decades of Ukraine’s regained independence demonstrates that the country’s road to building a civil society has been turbulent. Between 1991 and 2023 Ukraine had two major revolutions which were the aftermath of electoral fraud and the controversial decision of President Viktor Yanukovych to strengthen ties with Russia by refusing to sign the European Union — Ukraine Association Agreement. The latter was followed by Russia’s annexation of Crimea and the ongoing war, which escalated in early 2022, contributing to the deaths of thousands of people, including children, and the country. The three events led to decommunization, revaluation of historical memory, and the blossoming of civil society. This chapter showcases that in the last thirty years citizenship and agency have gradually become important topics in Ukrainian culture, including children’s and young adult literature. Studying two historical novels published after 2014, the author demonstrates how selected Ukrainian writers approach the matters of active citizenship and agency by highlighting the importance of history and education in the process.

This chapter explores child language activism as a form of geopolitical agency through a close critical content analysis of a dual language picturebook from Aotearoa New Zealand (ANZ), Te Kōtiro Nohinohi e Noho Patata Ana (The Small Girl Who Lives Next Door 2022). Language activists are groups or individuals who strive to protect their rights to use their languages in a range of places and contexts. In ANZ there is a rich history of language activism supporting the revitalization of ANZ’s Indigenous language, te reo Māori. Through the lens of language activism, this chapter explores how the text and image of picturebooks can represent a form of “quiet” but powerful language activism led by children in a personal sphere. It offers a case study for the ways in which cultural heritage may be preserved, showing that the benefit of engaging with new knowledge, world views and language is the path to agency for the child protagonists in this story, and by extension for readers as future language activists.

Representations of children in literature for children have always reflected the roles that children are seen to have in their local contexts. From the late twentieth century, in Canadian children’s literature, many children have been depicted as political and social actors with agency of their own whose actions can lead to positive change, whether within their own family, amongst their friends, at their schools, or within society more widely. This chapter considers how Canadian children’s literature has increasingly depicted children as having agency in their own lives. It will explore this increase in represented agency from multiple perspectives, from the invitation to agential reading made in postmodern picturebooks like Mélanie Watt’s Chester (2007) to the trans/queer agencies of Kai Cheng Thom’s From the Stars in the Sky to the Fish in the Sea (2017) and the networked resistance to bullying shown in Susin Nielsen’s We Are All Made of Molecules (2015). The chapter also considers how Indigenous children’s books encourage readers to become geopolitical agents through its consideration of Cherie Dimaline’s The Marrow Thieves (2017), which not only encourages readers’ privileging of multiple perspectives and “coming-to” stories but also centers an anticolonial Indigenous (geo)politics for our times.

Established during World War II on the model of the Soviet Pioneer Organization, the Union of Pioneers of Yugoslavia cultivated socialist and patriotic values through extracurricular activities and collaboration with schools. Pioneers were expected to embody solidarity, brotherhood, collectivism, and loyalty to Tito. Yet childhood within this framework was neither uniform nor static: it navigated tensions between reproducing existing power structures and exercising agency that could challenge them. Seen through a global and transnational lens, Yugoslav childhood emerges as fluid, hybrid, and mobile, crossing geographic, cultural, and ideological borders while engaging in broader imaginaries of activism and socialist citizenship. Depictions of pioneer characters in war novels illustrate how children were imagined as political actors whose subjectivities developed across national and international discourses. Drawing on Bakhtin’s notion of dialogism, the chapter highlights the polyphony of voices — oscillating between conformity, activism, and resistance — that constituted socialist childhood. Situating these experiences at the intersection of politics, literature, and transnational flows, the analysis presents children as active agents rather than passive recipients of ideology.

This chapter assesses the ways in which Palestinian children’s literature has represented and promoted identity and belonging in a context in which national rights remain unrealized and both children and those who write for them face displacement, migration, and occupation, with all the resultant privations. Within this context, identity takes on multinational and transnational dimensions while simultaneously reflecting domestic experience in which national rights and sovereign powers remain painfully abstract. Palestinian children’s literature has evolved over time, most notably since the establishment of Israel in 1948, with the experiences of those within Israel, those in the West Bank and Gaza, and those scattered across the Arab world and beyond, leading to some shared but also increasingly diverse themes in literature for the young. Palestinian children’s literature writers have tried to reflect trauma but also (re)affirm unifying values, drawing on folklore and the past, on notions of “land” and “homeland”, and on steadfastness when historical forces have splintered Palestinians’ sense of belonging in Israel, in the Occupied Territories, and in the diaspora.

This chapter delves into the spatiality and geopolitics of Muslim girlhood within the narratives of Marzieh Meshkini’s The Day I Became a Woman (2000) and Fawzia Afzal-Khan’s Lahore with Love: Growing Up with Girlfriends, Pakistani-Style (2010), against religio-patriarchal backdrops in Pakistan and Iran, offering a nuanced understanding of the agential and political potential of Muslim girlhood. By highlighting the protagonists’ playful engagement with hudood laws, it illustrates their navigation and subversion of these laws as both legal and metaphorical barriers, contextualizing play as a mechanism that both sustains and critiques geopolitical agendas and imaginations and offers resistance to examine “school” and “household” as dual spaces of confinement and liberation.

This chapter explores a series of anti-corruption children’s books that emerged in post-authoritarian Indonesia. With over 150 titles since 2016, these books, identified by the Berani Jujur Hebat (Honesty is Bravery) label, position children as “becomings” rather than “beings”, emphasizing socialization into ideal citizenship. Among these, sixteen picturebooks portray child agency within didactic narratives, showcasing children navigating moral dilemmas independently while adults take passive roles. This chapter explores selected anti-corruption books, drawing on Weikle-Mills’s concept of “imaginary citizens” (2013) and Beauvais’s The Mighty Child: Time and Power in Children’s Literature (2015). It argues that these books shape children as “imaginary citizens”, instilling societal adherence without direct political engagement, yet empowering the “mighty child” to challenge adult authority and transform the future.

The chapter reads A Bend in Time: Writings by Children on the COVID-19 Pandemic (2020) to examine literature written by youth as a political act and a reclamation of their literary space, in this case by urban children who use their privilege and voice to comment on social issues of climate change, poverty, and healthcare. They display a diverse and widely ranging vision with a developing sense of activism, particularly at such a historic time as the pandemic. Building on this, I propose, that they also draw their own definitions of nation and inclusive nationhoods. This chapter considers the role of adults in creating space for agentic youth to reimagine the nation, in its ongoing present and its possible future, in crisis time. The dynamics of allyship shared between the adult publishers and the child authors are examined through publisher interviews and are read as an act of collective and inter-generational resistance against hegemonies in traditional children’s publishing in post-Independence India, where children were recipients of nationalistic ideologies.

A waterway of major geopolitical and environmental importance, the Nile River also has special historical/cultural, material, and spiritual significance in the Egyptian psyche, which in turn offers a vital foundation for cultivating eco-citizenship and ecoliteracy in young people. This chapter focuses on a selection of picturebooks produced during the new wave in Egyptian children’s literature (2000–2020), which focus on the Nile River, asking how these texts promote environmental understanding. Drawing on Greta Gaard’s three kinds of ecoliteracy necessary for developing an ecopedagogy, the analysis examines the books’ capacity to foster an emotional bond with nature, advance bioregional environmental literacy, and equip children with critical skills for ecocritical engagement. This chapter also examines how contemporary environmental discourses, particularly those concerning the Nile River, shape childhood in Egypt, assessing the child’s agency in addressing ecological challenges.

This chapter examines the representation of LGBTIQA+ individuals and same-sex families in Russian children’s and young adult literature, focusing on the coming-of-age novel Дни нашей жизни (The Days of Our Lives, 2020) by Mikita Franko. Set against the state’s legislative backdrop of homophobia, Franko’s novel offers a poignant autobiographical perspective on the challenges faced by Russia’s LGBTIQA+ community. Analyzing the novel through the prism of queer children’s literature, the study draws parallels with real-life experiences of children from Russian same-sex families. It highlights the power of young adult literature to act as a form of protest and identity expression, emphasizing its role in altering societal perception, fostering acceptance of the LGBTIQA+ community and countering the dominant cultural and political narratives in Russia.

Childhood studies underwent a transformative shift in the 1980s, when scholars challenged the prevailing developmental perspective viewing children as preparing for adulthood. Recognizing children as socially constructed agents, this shift nevertheless oversimplifies agency as an intrinsic trait of individuals, neglecting its dependencies on geopolitical, sociocultural, and material contexts. Drawing on new materialism, this study explores the agencies of three young adults — William Kamkwamba, Xiuhtezcatl Martinez, and Greta Thunberg — through the readings of their life writings. In addition to tracing how their agencies emerge through networks of human and non-human forces, it examines how they are narratively constructed and performed through their life writings. This approach encourages a reconsideration of agency beyond human subjects, offering insights into how diverse contexts and forces both limit and empower individuals.

Inclusive children’s literature is vital. Books can shape how young readers from socially marginalized backgrounds see themselves as well as how readers from dominant groups see and understand diversity. This chapter presents results of our cross-cultural, interdisciplinary research project, which explored the role of inclusive children’s literature in empowering teachers and readers in understanding social justice issues. Our project focused on books for 8–11-year-olds, which is a critical period in academic development, and one where there is often a decline in children reading for pleasure. Through our project, we engaged with Scottish and German teachers, student teachers, and pupils in an interactive inquiry into reading for pleasure. We could thus better understand how primary school teachers curate and engage with inclusive books, increasing the potential to foster critique of cultural imperialism and exclusionary master narratives by creating stronger and more equitable learning platforms.

This chapter explores epistemic injustices in the field of children’s literature research and its teaching practices in higher education. It argues that children’s ways of knowing are systematically marginalized in academic settings due to adultist and Eurocentric knowledge structures. The discussion is framed in childhood studies and posthumanist critiques, which have problematized the exclusion of children as epistemic agents. Three key exclusions are analyzed: the disregard for children’s contributions to literary discourse, the privileging of canonical literary culture over other media formats, and the dominance of universal aesthetic frameworks that obscure geopolitical and linguistic diversities. The chapter examines how scholarly knowledge reinforces epistemological hierarchies and proposes an “ethics of discomfort” to challenge these structures. It advocates for more porous and reciprocal research and teaching practices, where children’s cultural productions are explored beyond adultist and colonial frameworks. Ultimately, this chapter calls for a rethinking of the field, moving toward an inclusive, decolonial, and relational practice of children’s literature scholarship.