The alternative is refusal, a generative absence that reveals the precarity of our situations and destroys the symbol of the child

[Alexandra Lakind, PhD in environment and resources from University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2022, “Children in Absentia: Reproductive Futurism in the Era of Climate Change”, University of Wisconsin-Madison https://asset.library.wisc.edu/1711.dl/2D6I6F4OXVMPR8B/R/file-5b76a.pdf]//owen

Absence is an invitation to start in the ruins of the imagined loss of a predictable future. The figuration of “the child” is marked by absence, what it is not rather than what it is. “The child” is predicated on concepts like innocence, inexperience, and ignorance, an absence or lack of knowledge. “The child” is imagined without race, gender identity, and sexual desire (that is, until they develop through a pre-scripted coming of age story). “The child” is seen as free from sin and, therefore, able to move into a future adulthood of property, legal kinship, and familial succession. Thus, revisiting Edelman is a starting point in the work of unmaking “the child” upon which the present is enacted, and the future is imagined. This unmaking could be generative, allowing actual children to inform their surroundings and inspire new subjectivities. I began with Edelman because this work has become a focal point for many theorists invested in larger conversations around contemporary child figurations and their role in notions of the future. For instance, Julian Gill-Peterson’s work illustrates how “the child” in neoliberal capital differs from the idealized modern concept of (white) childhood that took root in the Progressive Era (see Macleod, 1998 cited in Gill-Peterson, 2015). Gill-Peterson demarcates how “the child” changed in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis through examples that illuminate the pressures of entrepreneurship, particularly for Black and brown youth, to accrue futurity through the digital economy. For these children, the future requires investment in the present; the self a basic resource to be used in the absence of resources from society (2015). Here, “the child” is shown as a key player in the perpetuation of debt and expansion of wealth inequality. GillPeterson’s writing operates alongside scholars like Heather Davis (2015) and Rebekah Seldon (2016) who counter and expand Edelman’s proposition in relation to environmental catastrophe. Their work enabled me to think through the ways “the child” is simultaneously present and shifting in relation to the climate crisis in this dissertation. As I embarked on my research, the activists discussed across my case studies showcased how absence could strategically threaten reproductive futurism. Birthstrikers expressed concerns about children’s health and safety in a world destabilized by petrol-dependent lifestyles. In the affluent West, these lifestyles turn child-rearing into a site of carbon-heavy consumption and extractive and unjust relations. Birthsrikers were withholding their uterine and parenting labor to take power, to demand safer working and living conditions for them and the children they might bear. In the School Strikes for Climate, youth activists emphasized that the future will be so drastically different from the present that school was no longer adequate preparation. Their protests shined a light on the absurdity of homework, grades, and college readiness in the face of climate-induced disaster. School strikers also refused to engage in a predetermined adult/child divide. They abstained from school to stop adults from continuing business as usual, and thereby disrupting the daily mechanisms of capitalism. It was their lack of presence in school that instigated disruptions to the norm. As Andrew Marantz (2020) has written on Gene Sharp’s analysis of tactics like bureaucratic slow walking, boycotts, and strikes, “in the history of political change, the winning combination of tactics may look like an absence –or, to the untrained eye, like nothing at all.” In these cases, real and imagined absences brought attention to climate change as activists leveraged the under-questioned status of the institutions of the school and the family. By abstaining from their assumed roles in the school and the family, activists made the oftoverlooked work of learning and reproduction visible. Their absence was practical and conceptual, highlighting the way that capitalism relies on unpaid feminized, domestic labor to ensure the necessary work of childcare and reproduction. These activists asked people to try to imagine a world without children, a world where school and family—the lynchpins of capitalist society—unravel. Whether intending to or not, they raised the concern that climate change will destroy these institutions. By doing so, these activists challenged reproductive futurism and brought to light the precarity and social contingency of these institutions using the specter of a forlorn future that is absent of children.