Child

Child

Volume 43, Numbers 1 & 2, Spring/Summer 2015
Cynthia Chris, Matt Brim
Excerpted from the Editor’s Note

On October 10, 2014, Malala Yousafzai and Kailash Satyarthi were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize “for their struggle against the suppression of children and young people and for the right of all children to education” (NNC 2014). Sharing the award with Satyarthi, an Indian advocate for the end of child labor, Yousafzai became the first Pakistani to win the Peace Prize. At seventeen, she was also the youngest-ever recipient. Yousafzai had been a local and then national figure since she was twelve and began blogging under a pseudonym (for the BBC’s online news service in Urdu) about her experiences as a girl living under the oppressive rule of the Taliban in Swat, Pakistan. Though she won the 2011 International Children’s Peace Prize, Yousafzai’s full entrance onto the international stage came after an assassination attempt by the Taliban in October 2012. That shooting left her with a grave head wound but did not derail her political work. Known best as Malala—her 2013 memoir is titled I Am Malala—the young activist calls to mind the power of children to articulate a world-changing vision…

Child, the spring/summer 2015 issue of WSQ, is implicitly framed by the question of the legibility of children. In its various responses to this question, the issue advances the scholarly and artistic investment in the stories, messages, and meanings of children, even as it reflects on its own acts of critical re-narrativization.