Editorial: Approaching the Poetics and Politics of Child Culture(s) in the Nordic Context

Abstract

Building on the BIN (Børnekultur forskning i Norden) conference of 2025, the BUKS Journal of Child and Youth Cultures hereby presents the special issue: The Poetics and Politics of Child Culture(s). This issue highlights the aesthetic, practical, economic, and ideological possibilities and challenges facing child and youth cultures today, where »child and youth culture« refers to culture by, for, and among children and young people in the broadest sense. The conceptual framework for this issue is built on two pillars that are often pitted against each other yet remain deeply intertwined. Poetics serves as a collective term for the promises and opportunities created through culture, pointing to the material, artistic, sensuous, and semiotic side of form—the how of things. Politics, on the other hand, gestures at the why of things, referring to the conditioning and discursive nature of representation and cultural exchange that often hinders the full potential of child culture (Hall 2013, 6).