Political Children

Mikaela Luttrell-Rowland is Senior Director of the Gender, Law, and Transformative Peace Institute at the City University of New York School of Law.

"This powerful ethnography provides a rich account of how the Peruvian state is lived, felt, and understood, demonstrating just how much we can learn when we really listen to children. Through a careful and sensitive analysis of their words and drawings, Mikaela Luttrell-Rowland sheds new light on the enduring legacies of state violence, the affective dimensions of state power, and the neoliberal dynamics of disinvestment and depoliticization. By engaging with two different groups of working children, one organized as a social movement and one not, Luttrell-Rowland reveals how all children-not just those who are activists-are political children."-Jessica K. Taft, University of California, Santa Cruz "In her clear yet nuanced analysis of state power, Mikaela Luttrell-Rowland masterfully foregrounds the political subjectivity and demands of youth. Political Children is a valuable contribution to our understanding of youth as agents and of the contradictions embedded in living in and fighting against injustices informed by legacies of colonialism, war, and economic inequities."-M. Cristina Alcalde, Miami University "From the first to the last page, Political Children makes a powerful call for us to stop, and to listen properly, to what marginalised children have to say about interlocking forms of environmental, structural, historical, and political violence. Zooming in on Lima, Peru but equally relevant to many other settings in the Global South and beyond, the book is a testament to the way in whichin-depth interviews, longitudinal ethnographic fieldwork and archival materials can all be harnessed to give agency to children while delivering insights into both the working of state power and the experience of translocal patterns of capital and environmental inequity. Far from being the silent receivers of rights, or just belonging to their families and hence located 'far from politics', Political Children breaks new ground in demonstrating that children are indeed the carriers of key political insights, which they articulate not simply in the mainstream language of rights but also inthe affective language of longing and desire. Methodologically impressive and theoretically sophisticated, Political Children is a must-read to overcome unexamined assumptions about children and learn what powerful socio-legal research can uncover if we stop and listen to them."-Luis Eslava, Kent Law School "As a lawyer and law professor, Luttrell-Rowland brings a different perspective than that of a typical social scientist to this study of working young people in Lima, Peru.... Recommended."-D. L. Browman, CHOICE "Showing just how political children's lives are, and how important it is to take them seriously as political actors if we truly wish to understand their place in society, remains one of the main tenants of critical childhood and children's rights scholarship. Luttrell Rowland's book is an important contribution to this body of work, as it seeks to expose and understand the various ways in which state power operates by listening to two different groups of children whose lives are characterized by structural violence, poverty, and work." -Edward van Daalen, Law & Society Review