Pluriversality of Childhood in Global South: Imagining Global Solidarity, Agency, and More-than-Human World
Convener: Yulida Pangastuti
Co-convener: Realisa Massardi
This panel seeks to reposition childhood at the centre of anthropological debates on pluriversal futures in a multipolarising world. It aims to show that children in the Global South are not merely shaped by global transformations but are actively involved in interpreting, negotiating, and reworking them in everyday life. The panel investigates how children in Indonesia make sense of and act within conditions shaped by displacement, ecological turmoil, cultural conflict, and distant geopolitical strife.
The scope of the panel spans refugee transit, coastal climate change, traditional child jockey practices in Bima, and children’s moral engagements with Palestine. These cases differ in context, yet they converge in raising a shared set of questions: How do children live within conditions not of their choosing? How do they interpret injustice, risk, obligation, and belonging? In what ways is agency distributed across human and more-than-human relations, including housing arrangements, floodwaters, animals, infrastructures, ritual economies, digital media, and religious narratives? And how do these entanglements shape children’s political imagination and sense of global solidarity?
The panel focuses on the complexities and nuances of daily negotiation instead of portraying children as victims of precarity or as symbols of resilience. Children live within conditions marked by prolonged uncertainty, environmental disruption, and contested cultural expectations, while also forming connections to distant others through media and religious frameworks. Their ability to act is governed by power structures, economic limitations, and societal norms that are beyond their control. In this context, agency does not necessarily manifest as overt resistance or autonomy. It is often cautious, relational, and conditioned by circumstance. Nonetheless, these everyday practices are analytically significant. They illuminate how children develop understandings of injustice, responsibility, belonging, and care within unequal and shifting global contexts. Agency appears relational and situated, taking shape within specific places and material conditions. In this sense, childhood becomes a space where global asymmetries are absorbed, debated, normalised, or questioned.
The panel contributes to the symposium theme by demonstrating that pluriversality is not only articulated in formal political arenas or Indigenous cosmologies but also lived in childhood. Multipolarisation is experienced through the moral and affective life of young people, through how they come to understand responsibility toward others, including distant communities and more-than-human worlds. By foregrounding children’s perspectives, the panel argues for a recalibration of anthropological attention. If the Global South is to be recognised as an epistemic centre, then the world that children inhabit and imagine must be treated as central to how alternative futures are crafted, negotiated, and contested.
