Childhood is often imagined as a period of innocence, protection, and dependence. However, across many historical and contemporary contexts, children experience various forms of violence, including interpersonal abuse, structural inequality, displacement, war, and environmental harm. Recent scholarship in childhood studies has challenged the tendency to view children solely as vulnerable victims, emphasizing their capacity for agency, resilience, and political engagement. Understanding how cultural narratives represent these experiences is essential for examining broader questions of justice, rights, and social belonging. Taking this into perspective, the panel seeks to explore how literature, film, visual culture, and other narrative forms depict children’s encounters with interpersonal, structural, and slow violence across diverse cultural contexts, while examining how these narratives foreground children’s agency, political subjectivity, and everyday practices of resistance.

We invite papers that examine representations of childhood, violence, political becoming, and resistance in literature, film, media, visual culture, and related cultural forms. We seek contributions that explore how children navigate, witness, contest, and survive diverse forms of violence while emerging as ethical, political, and social actors. Topics may include, but are not limited to: child displacement and migration; political victimization; children’s resistance and agency; slow and structural violence; children’s literature and picturebooks; childhood in film and visual culture; biopolitics and necropolitics; and Global South perspectives on childhood and justice.