73 JOURNAL OF CHILDHOOD STUDIES JANUARY 2023 Vol. 48 No. 1 IDEAS FROM PRACTICE Refusing to Grow Old: The Antichronocratic Labour of Cypriot Activist Youth and What It Can Teach Us About Decolonizing Childhood and Related Knowledge Production Georgina Christou Georgina Christou is a postdoctoral research fellow in the Department of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Cyprus where she currently works on the funded project Youth Autonomous Politics, Contested Urban Spaces and the Right to the City. The project expands work undertaken during her PhD. Her research interests include youth social movements, the politics of childhood and youth, gentrification policies, and right to the city struggles. In her doctoral work, she researched Cypriot youths’ autonomous horizontal politics and the role of public space in processes of political becoming. She has published in edited volumes and international peer-reviewed journals. Email: christou.georgina@ucy.ac.cy In their recent book The Time of Anthropology Kirtsoglou and Simpson (2020) take on the issues of power and time and propose the notion of chronocracy, which they define as “the discursive and practical ways in which temporal regimes are used in order to deny coevalness and thereby create deeply asymmetrical relationships of exclusion and domination either between humans (in diverse contexts) or between humans and other organisms and our ecologies” (p. 3). The denial of coevalness, which refers to the temporal practice of denying the existence of the “Other” in the present time in order to mark them as backwards and thus in need of development and civilization, was a primary practice of colonial regimes to justify interventions in the governing of colonized people’s lives (Fabian, 1983). Kirtsoglou and Simpson suggest that such practice still continues today through hegemonic forms of governing temporality, that is, chronocratic practices, and term the work of anthropologists who expose such governing by giving emphasis to the existence of multiple temporalities as counterchronocratic labour and thus decolonial labour. In line with such arguments, it has been well documented within childhood studies (James, 2009; James & Prout, 1997; Lee, 2001) that a primary form of governing children has been to view them not as beings in the present but primarily as becomings, validated as subjects only when they reached adulthood and particularly a form of adulthood that assumes the perceived qualities of white adult European males (i.e., rational, efficient, individualized, independent). It goes without saying that for most children (and adults) this is an a priori impossible endeavour. What has not perhaps been given equal attention, although there are some key writings on this issue, are the colonial underpinnings of such governing, which I would term as a form of denial of coevalness. Olga Nieuwenhuys (2013) has argued that “the depiction of colonized people as historically occupying a lower rung on the ladder leading to the Through registering the chronopolitics of Cypriot teenage antiauthoritarian activists, this article explores the antichronocratic labour of children as a way to engage with processes of degrowth and to create dissident everyday temporalities through which to build alternative communities and relations in the present. It is argued that paying attention to such labour unsettles the hegemonic temporality of linear development and the individualized child of capitalist modernity while also troubling the consequent individual character of agency that has been hegemonic in childhood studies thus far. Such attention must infuse research on childhood(s) in its attempt to decolonize childhood and related knowledge production. Key words: temporality; degrowth; decolonization; youth activism; everyday 74 JOURNAL OF CHILDHOOD STUDIES JANUARY 2023 Vol. 48 No. 1 IDEAS FROM PRACTICE higher, European civilization showed remarkable parallels with theories of child development that were emerging at the same time in Europe” (p. 5). In relation to this argument, Nancy Lesko (1996) has demonstrated that the inquiry “into lower species during colonialism such as women, children and savages was seen as illuminating the evolutionary progression of the race and factors contributing or blocking it” (p. 146). Psychologists of adolescence explicitly “drew analogies between women, savages and youths” (p. 147), and thus child development and human evolution, as Lesko suggests, were established as mirrors of each other. Such mirroring has further informed what have been termed development and aid policies, often leading to constructions of an infantilized South that fell behind the civilization standards of a “mature,” adult North (Burman, 1994a, 1994b). Taking inspiration from such analyses, I suggest that paying attention to the counterchronocratic politics of children, that is, how children actively resist the hegemonic temporalities that either deny them coevalness and/or attempt to subdue them into a linear, progressive journey to adulthood, betterment, and development, constitutes a form of decolonial labour. Active resistance insinuates more direct forms of politics that in the case of underage actors often take the form of social movement participation propelled by their exclusion from official political platforms. Paying attention, I would argue, to the collective politics of children—that is, how children relate and co-organize with others to effect change—takes the work of decolonization one step further as it challenges the individualized child of modernity and neoliberalism and the consequent individual character of agency that has been hegemonic in the field of childhood studies until recently. Such attention must infuse research on childhood(s) in their aim to expose the colonial legacies underlying such forms of governing, including knowledge production. Indeed, paying attention to such forms of counterchronocratic labour and collective politics must be seen as part of the work of decolonizing childhood. Questioning the (Westerncentric) limits of childhood and related knowledge production Within the continuously proliferating work on decolonizing childhood and knowledge production on children, as well as within more recent work that attempts to reimagine childhood studies (Spyrou, 2018; Spyrou et al., 2019), there is increasing recognition of the need to engage with relational forms of agency or to understand agency in a relational way. In fact, Millei et al. (2018), in their important work on decolonizing childhood, suggest that providing visibility to the relational self, that is, the self as it emerges through “a network of social relations” (p. 249), is a step away from “the autonomous, self-contained individual” (p. 249) of modernity. In a similar way, Cannella and Viruru (2004) argue that we need to perceive childhood as a phenomenon that is not isolated but interconnected with larger issues; consequently, we need to perceive children as part of larger wholes, “as linked to and influencing the larger and more complex world” (p. 3). Social movements and their study are first and foremost exactly about that: exploring the relational self that is produced through a network of social relations (see della Porta & Diani, 2006), as well as the conscious effort of people, especially within antiauthoritarian movements, to build alternative communities and forms of relationality to the ones that have become hegemonic within modernity and which support the consistent exploitation of the less privileged within late capitalism. Despite this fact, childhood studies, until recently, showed a peculiar lack of interest toward studying the movements children participate in or initiate, particularly in the global North. Beyond few exceptions, including research on working children’s movements (see Liebel, 2003; Liebel et al., 2001; van Daalen & Mabillard, 2019), what is mostly studied are individual forms of children’s agency or children’s participation through institutional means, that although crucial in countering the idea of the passive, in-development child, seem to still maintain a dominant order founded upon modernist dichotomies of (private/institutionalized) child versus (public actor) adult. However, part of decolonial labour, as Kristen Cheney (2019) suggests, is precisely to explore “where attention 75 JOURNAL OF CHILDHOOD STUDIES JANUARY 2023 Vol. 48 No. 1 IDEAS FROM PRACTICE to children lies and what sorts of knowledge production about children is deemed relevant and recognizable” (p. 95) and consequently, I would argue, what types of knowledge production are perceived as irrelevant to be taken on in relation to children and/or where childhood studies draws its boundaries. Looking therefore into ways and/or methods to decolonize childhood and related knowledge production means going back to these colonial legacies of the conceptualization and management of childhood in order to unsettle them. This involves not only studying children as present individual actors, as has been widely done within childhood studies so far, but also paying attention to and exploring how children and teenagers themselves actively disrupt such legacies through conscious counterchronocratic practices and politics of time that challenge the denial of coevalness and the idea of progression toward a predefined telos. Challenging the denial of coevalness does not necessarily mean claiming coevalness, but as I will show later, it might involve processes of degrowing, or becoming minor, achieved through conscious antihegemonic practice. Paying attention then to children’s counterchronocratic practices, through which they open up time-spaces within modernity for building alternative communities and networking with like-minded groups, as well as for engaging with processes of degrowth, must be seen as a way to give validation and visibility to the times of those constructed as Others of Western civilized subjects—and to the ways these Others challenge the hegemonic temporality of linear development and anticipated progress and the isolated, individualized (child) subject of modernity. I intend to unfold this argument by first exploring in brief the management and colonization of time, and particularly children’s time, within modernity through chronocratic practices. I then propose, following radical activists and scholars of the 1960s, to understand children’s attempts to recapture the everyday through forms of collective self-organization as a key form of youths’ resistance to such colonization. Subsequently, I explore and situate chronocratic practices within the postcolonial and protracted conflict space of Cyprus, demonstrating how the common evolutionary practice of equating child development with national development (Burman, 2019; Lesko, 1996; Millei et al., 2018) takes particular contextual form and sets specific limits to the adults children can grow into. Finally, I explore a case of Cypriot youths’ collective resistance to such chronocratic regimes to register youths’ own challenging of the dominant temporalities of capitalist and nationalist modernity. Doing so gives visibility to the times of Others within Western modernity, as well as to children’s collective attempts to forge differentiated and interconnected subject positions to the ones offered by modernity/coloniality. In this process, I show how children construct dissident temporalities within which they are able to build alternative communities and author a collective antiauthoritarian political voice. At the same time, I show how such a politics involves attempts on the part of children to maintain themselves within the realm of childhood rather than grow into the adults the nation-state and modernity demand. I argue that these efforts are an attempt to remain in the process of “becoming minor,” of degrowing rather than growing into neoliberal, nationalist selves. Paying attention to children’s own attempts to degrow that are in line with wider projects of radical socioecological transformation (Kallis & March, 2015) constitutes a way to decolonize childhood and related knowledge production. Chronocratic regimes of childhood and youth Educational systems, and formal schooling in particular, have been a primary mechanism by which colonial governments attempted to systematically regulate the temporalities of the colonized and particularly, in this case, their children (Kidman et al., 2020). The associated clock time and timetable of the curriculum that divide time into a set number of hours and distribute bodies into regulated, individualized spaces to inscribe punctuality, efficiency, individuality, and predictability are central organizing principles of Western culture exported elsewhere. As Chris Jenks (2005) emphasized, they constitute a principal mode of disciplinary governance that is firmly 76 JOURNAL OF CHILDHOOD STUDIES JANUARY 2023 Vol. 48 No. 1 IDEAS FROM PRACTICE connected with ideas about individual realization. Schooling is seen as a primary way for self-realization, in other words, and those children who react or do not succumb to an obligatory schedule are often labelled pathological or deviant. If not schooled, one falls short of modernity, independence, or even full humanity—the characteristics of valid adulthood in modernity—with the predicted consequences that this might engender. This kind of colonization of time in modernity, and its resulting alienation, however, has reached far beyond schooling or working time. As the Situationists, a post-Marxist group of artists and intellectuals that partly instigated and participated in the university student protests of the 1960s in France and elsewhere, have proposed, free time is also heavily controlled through forms of commodification and regulation. Free time is also divided into blocks; it becomes a thing, a sellable good. Package holidays, theme parks, and shopping malls are brought as examples of governing what is otherwise perceived as free time (Plant, 1992). This overall commodification and appropriation of everyday life, for Situationists, stifles creativity, collectivity, and radical politics as participation is simulated through forms of individual consumption and commodity. The everyday, in other words, conceptualized also by Henri Lefebvre as a key site of capitalist regulation that produces alienation (see Gardiner, 2000), is depleted as an active field for intervention and social change. To cure this alienation the Situationists argued for a revolution of everyday life (Vaneigem, 1967/2001)— a proposition, in other words, to see revolution not as a one-off event but as everyday labour, which happens through small acts that recapture everyday life via forms of collective self-organization. The latter refers to active participation in the organization of spheres of life with the aim of creating alternative, more equitable and just worlds in the present. Especially for those excluded from official platforms of political participation—those recognized as exceptional spaces where “serious” politics is perceived to take place—such as children and teenagers, the everyday as a time-space must be understood as a primary field of political intervention and creativity to unsettle the hegemonic temporalities of modernity. Attempts to recapture the everyday, I propose, must be explored as forms of counterchronocratic labour through which youth attempt to challenge their placement as heterochronic subjects, whose validation is postponed to an anticipated future temporality, by actively creating worlds and communities in the present. Particularly children’s social movement activism, which, by its nature, involves youth attempting to build relations and alternative communities in the present, must be seen as a key form of resistance to youths’ chronocratic governance given that it more actively attempts to fight individualism and isolation, which constitute key conditions of modern/ capitalist living. In what follows I explore chronocratic regimes within the context of Cyprus to demonstrate how the common evolutionary process of equating child with national development takes particular forms that, in the case of a protracted conflict context, enhance the exclusionary and restrictive appeal of such processes in terms of commanding the proper ways to be modern, to be an adult. Chronocratic regimes in Cyprus In countries that have experienced ethnic conflict, such as Cyprus, this continuous linear progression to adulthood that assumedly brings forth self-realization, as well as the related colonial mechanism of denying coevalness, take on particular contextual connotations. In the case of the Greek-Cypriot community, children’s progressive journey to adulthood through schooling is further considered as a progressive journey to a (predestined) Greek national self. Education, for the Greek Cypriot authorities and particularly for the Greek Orthodox Church of Cyprus that has been key in managing educational issues for Greek Cypriots during the Ottoman Empire and while Cyprus was under British colonial rule (1878–1960), has been considered as a major way to cultivate in youth Greek orthodox 77 JOURNAL OF CHILDHOOD STUDIES JANUARY 2023 Vol. 48 No. 1 IDEAS FROM PRACTICE values and devotion to the nation (Persianis & Poliviou, 1992). For the Church and the Greek Cypriot elite this nation was Greece, and in fact the anticolonial struggle that was held by Greek Cypriots during the 1950s aimed not only at freedom from colonial rule but at union with Greece perceived as the natural national space in which Cyprus belonged, despite the existence of a substantial community of Turkish Cypriots on the island. According to Rebecca Bryant (2004, 2006), who conducted research on education in Cyprus during colonization, the way education was envisioned for Greek Cypriot schools shows that Greek Cypriots, or at least the Greek Orthodox elite, believed that “humans are, by nature, ethnic subjects, members of their race, and education is required to achieve their higher end” (2006, pp. 53–54). Bryant argues that “Greekness” was considered innate in Greek Cypriot children, and that it needed to be cultivated through education in order for them to reach their full potential. In other words, to become fully Greek one needed to undergo Greek education. Moreover, Greekness represented civilization and thus humanity for Greek Cypriots who, in an attempt to establish their hierarchy against colonized others, claimed ancient Greek civilization as ancestor of European civilization, a thesis that asserted modern Greeks (and, by extension, Greek-Cypriots) as not only of Western origin but as the descendants of the assumedly real ancestors of Europe (Bryant, 2006). Thus, to deny Greek Cypriots a Greek education meant to deny them civilization and, by extension, full humanity. Such a thesis legitimized claims to a separate educational system from Turkish Cypriots perceived as polluting elements to an otherwise pure culture. Such separations were in any case reinforced by the colonial regime through their inscription and codification in the colonial constitution in order “to manage the heterogeneity of the ‘native’ Other” (Gregoriou, 2004, p. 254). Building on Bryant’s (2004, 2006) argument and given the wider (post)colonial context of the time, where schooling was perceived as the means to become modern, developed, adult, I argue that Greekness was further associated with adulthood within the Greek-Cypriot context, as achieving Greekness through schooling meant reaching full realization. If not schooled in a Greek educational system, with the nationalist outlook it engendered, one was considered degenerate, underdeveloped, not fully Greek and therefore uncivilized, not fully adult. In this sense, the denial of coevalness within this context took particular nationalist connotations. Such perceptions pervade Greek Cypriot education to the present day. After independence in 1960 and the founding of the bicommunal state, intercommunal fighting erupted. Subsequently, a coup, supported by the military junta in Greece against the Cypriot president in 1974, was followed by a Turkish military invasion of the island followed, resulting in the physical separation of the two communities between a Turkish-Cypriot administered north and a Greek-Cypriot administered south, with the state in the south recognized internationally as the Republic of Cyprus. After division, an already nationalistic curriculum in the Greek Cypriot community was further reinforced and served to indoctrinate children into what has been defined as the primary political goal of the nation: to liberate their land from Turkish occupation and return it to its rightful—Greek Cypriot—owners (see Bryant & Papadakis, 2012; M. Christou, 2006). In this imagination, children become symbolic of the nation’s survival and therefore atemporal as children’s present concerns and relationships with collectives that might also disapprove of nationalism become irrelevant. In nationalism, children often become spectacular given that the past is identified with the future, compressing the present. Dissident temporalities and the chronopolitics of Cypriot youth Within such restrictive chronocratic regimes of childhood, resistance is expected to take heavily temporal forms. For the case of the Greek Cypriot antiauthoritarian youth community I have studied through an 18-month process of ethnographic fieldwork in central Nicosia1, time was perceived as something to be reclaimed from adult authorities. More specifically, a pupils’ autonomous collective within this antiauthoritarian community with which 78 JOURNAL OF CHILDHOOD STUDIES JANUARY 2023 Vol. 48 No. 1 IDEAS FROM PRACTICE I engaged more thoroughly defined themselves as Skapoula, a Greek Cypriot slang word that indicates truancy, or skipping school. Skapoula literally means “escape” and it is particularly used by Greek Cypriot pupils to indicate an illegitimate absence from school. In fact, skapoula is a common practice conducted mostly by secondary school students in Cyprus to spend the day as they see fit. The frequency of the practice of skapoula, however, is indicative of pupils’ frustration at the overwhelming management of pupils’ time by adult authorities, as they are called to spend approximately seven hours every day within classrooms following curricula decided on adult terms. It further indicates intense feelings of boredom in relation to a highly didactic and nationalistic delivery of education, particularly within public schools, which leaves little room for participatory, critical, and interactive methods of learning and for children’s present concerns and realities to come forward. Such feelings were registered in Skapoula’s Magazine, a regular publication Skapoula members prepared and distributed in schools and streets. In Issue 2, under the title “Why We Don’t Dig Schooling,” Skapoula wrote: “We don’t dig parroting. We want to think, question and critique. We don’t dig the imposition of religion, and of the ‘Greco-Christian’ ideal. We don’t dig after school private classes. They steal our mornings; they steal our afternoons!” (Skapoula, 2011). The text was accompanied by the picture of a student leaned forward on his school desk. Underneath the word BORED was written in capital letters. In this context, skapoula and its frequency can be read as a diagnostic of power (Abu-Lughod, 1990). Resistance, in other words, works here as a chemical catalyst (Foucault, 1982) that reveals power relations and their particular ways and spaces of application. In this case it is revealing of the highly authoritarian educational practice implemented by the Ministry of Education within schools. From such governance pupils seek forms of escape. Researcher: Why name the group Skapoula? Ermis: Because it was a pupil thing. Billis: Because Skapoula constitutes a form of claiming our free time, so that we go and sit in parks. It was also something against the educational system, in general; all this time that we waste in school doing nothing, to be able to manage it ourselves the way we want to. For the group Skapoula itself, in which Ermis and Billis were key members, the practice of skapoula was a form of resistance in terms of being a direct reclaiming of time from the authorities to be used on one’s own terms. For Skapoula, the way pupils’ time is filled up and who has a say in that was not unproblematic; instead, they made it into a political concern, highlighting it as a specific way of governing pupils’ lives. This direct reclaiming of time exposed the occupation of one’s time as a deeply political practice and “as a medium of hierarchic power and governance” (Munn, 1992, p. 109). The time earned by skapoula, for these antiauthoritarian youth, was often spent at Faneromeni Square, a central public square in Nicosia’s old town that was constructed as a regular hangout space for youth and eventually was produced into a public sphere in which different opinions that could not be discussed in schools, such as ones challenging nationalism and ethnic division, were shared by unofficial groups of youth becoming active there (see G. Christou, 2021, for more detail). Moreover, during afternoon time or even at night during weekends, youth at the square developed alternative forms of entertainment, like self-organized street parties, that held a clear anticonsumerist ethos because the participants consciously understood themselves as being against the mainstream entertainment culture of chain coffee shops and night clubs. Instead, free time was reclaimed to be spent playfully at the square, where community bonds were created among youth that fought the alienation of modern consumerist spaces and of the schooling system. Play was reclaimed in this sense, from being an assumedly politically neutral free time for children, to being politically meaningful by taking on the sense of experimentation where identities 79 JOURNAL OF CHILDHOOD STUDIES JANUARY 2023 Vol. 48 No. 1 IDEAS FROM PRACTICE beyond those inflicted by the status quo were tried on for size. This reclamation was expressed in a text written collectively by youth regulars at Faneromeni Square in 20092 and distributed in city streets. In the text the youth expressed what they were claiming with their constant presence and occupation of the square. I quote an excerpt from the text below: We claim one of the few squares of our city. So that we create our own hangout outside of profit, so that we build relationships between us. Relationships that are based on humanity, not on money. We claim our entertainment. Our free entertainment beyond bars and clubs that one needs to pay 50 euro per night for entry and drinks. Beyond such kind of places where socialization is negligible and fake. We claim back the time stolen from us by routine. School-afternoon class-home, home-work-home. They sack our energy on an everyday basis while we remain passive spectators. We claim the present. Neither the future, nor the past. The text demonstrates the construction of an alternative everydayness and counterculture at the square that constituted a way for youth to recapture the everyday from schooling and consumerism by creating dissident temporalities where they could participate in public life in the here and now. The colonial chronocratic tactic of the denial of coevalness reproduced in modernity through schooling was being challenged at the square, where youth were questioning their production as heterochronic subjects through playful practices, creating in this sense community and alternative worlds in which to be and express themselves in the present, challenging simultaneously the forms of spectacular childhood produced by nationalism. This alternative everydayness was further used by Skapoula youth as a time-space to hold their assemblies and prepare their political talk against the nationalist educational system and militarism and racism in Cyprus, among other issues. This political talk was distributed in the form of brochures and a regular magazine in schools and city streets. With this political talk Skapoula attempted to connect the individualized subject position of the child/ pupil with larger constituencies and social movements, as well as with other polemical global subject positions, such as that of “the worker,” in order to collectivize this category and demonstrate its interconnection with larger wholes (for extensive analysis of this practice see G. Christou, 2018). Skapoula youth thus fought the individualism inherent in perceptions of “the” child in modernity by coexisting and acting collaboratively in a direct democratic assembly of pupils while also actively seeking connections with the larger world. Moreover, within this political talk, playtime—and, by extension, childhood—as the quintessential time for play in the West, was often reclaimed as resistance by Skapoula youth, this time to the overarching rituals of adulthood within Cypriot society. The example below is indicative. In Assixtir 13, a street brochure prepared by Skapoula that dealt with the educational system, as well as with rising fascism within Cypriot society and its historical links to figures much celebrated in school history textbooks, the following line is emphasized as a response to all the above: “I’d rather stay a child and keep my self-respect if being an adult means being like you.” Staying a child here means rejecting the overarching rituals of adulthood in Cyprus, which, as seen earlier, relate to becoming an obedient proponent of the Greek and Christian ideals and willing to sacrifice oneself for those ideals. In choosing to stay children, Skapoula members effectively reject being turned into (Greek) nationalists. They reject the choices of adulthood and self-realization presented by Greek-Cypriot authorities, and the wider modernist project, by seeking to remain within the realm of childhood that they see as more morally sound in nature. Childhood as a time-space here becomes an antihegemonic space of resistance to the dominant temporalities of capitalist and nationalist modernity. 80 JOURNAL OF CHILDHOOD STUDIES JANUARY 2023 Vol. 48 No. 1 IDEAS FROM PRACTICE This process of staying a child is reminiscent of the process of becoming minor or “minoritarian” in Deleuze and Guattari’s terms (1987, p. 105), which involves a process of constant variation from the hegemonic versions of oneself (through engagement with nonhegemonic practices), as well as variation from society’s hegemonic rendering of categories—such as child and pupil—through which to experience oneself. It involves, in other words, a process of degrowth, as well as a subversion of these categories through infusing them with different meaning that challenges ageism, individualism, and the inflicted temporalities of capitalist modernity that lead to uneven worlds. By claiming to stay children, Skapoula youth effectively refuse to grow old in the ways expected from them by the establishment. They thus turn the authoritarian governing of time, which seeks to infantilize them and maintain them within a space of development, on its head by choosing effectively to remain in the process of “becoming minor” in the present. Conclusion As Millei et al. (2018, p. 242) propose, a key strategy for decolonization might be to rethink “time and space as other than objective, linear, and singular” and to challenge the association of children with (national) development and most importantly with “the teleology of development” (Burman, 2019, p. 20). One way to do so, as I proposed in this article, is to give attention to the antichronocratic labour of children with which they attempt to challenge such hegemonic perceptions of time in modernity. By exploring the chronopolitics of, and in this case the construction of dissident temporalities by, Cypriot antiauthoritarian teenage youth, be it the creation of alternative temporal zones or the reclaiming of childhood as time-space for resistance, I attempted to give visibility and validation to the times and politics of those constructed as Other of Western modernity and their attempts to degrow by cultivating minor positionalities to the ones supported by the nationalist and neoliberal establishment. I further attempted to expose the existence of multiple worlds, such as ones where children build relationality, solidarity, and collective, self-organized fun, beyond those inflicted by national and neoliberal modernizing projects. Such endeavour can be achieved more broadly by paying attention to how youth attempt to recapture the everyday as the primary field where they can be politically active on their own terms and create alternative communities where they can experiment with different, nonhegemonic versions of the self, or in other words, where they can remain in the process of “becoming minor.” Such communities, I suggested, are primarily created through the involvement of children and teenagers in countercultures or social movements that by themselves require a relational form of agency. Paying more attention to children’s involvement in such collectivities, and how through such involvement they unsettle adult hegemonic time, which has become a key concern of current activist children (see G. Christou et al., 2022), constitutes a further form of decolonizing childhood studies, as such involvement necessarily privileges relational forms of agency and children as public political actors over the individualized, apolitical, underdeveloped child of colonialism and modernity. This privileging troubles the focus on individual forms of agency that have been hegemonic in childhood studies thus far by placing children within wider social totalities, as well as by acknowledging their attempts to connect with wider agonistic communities—a key tactic of decolonization (see Bhambra, 2014, in her discussion of Quijano, 2007) to be pursued further in the future. Attention to what sort of knowledge production is deemed relevant or irrelevant to be taken on in relation to children can help us disturb the boundaries of childhood studies and question Westerncentric approaches within and beyond knowledge production. Funding This work was financially supported by the ONISILOS Postdoctoral Program of the University of Cyprus. 81 JOURNAL OF CHILDHOOD STUDIES JANUARY 2023 Vol. 48 No. 1 IDEAS FROM PRACTICE Acknowledgments The author would like to express her deep gratitude to all the research participants, and particularly to the youth of the Skapoula collective who welcomed me in their circles and generously shared with me their experiences of being a young antiauthoritarian activist in Cyprus. 82 JOURNAL OF CHILDHOOD STUDIES JANUARY 2023 Vol. 48 No. 1 IDEAS FROM PRACTICE References Abu-Lughold, L. (1990). The romance of resistance: Tracing transformations of power through Bedouin women. American Ethnologist, 17(1), 41–55. https://doi.org/10.1525/ae.1990.17.1.02a00030 Bhambra, G. K. (2014). Postcolonial and decolonial dialogues. Postcolonial Studies, 17(2), 115–121. https://doi.org/10.1080/13688790. 2014.966414 Bryant, R. (2004). Imagining the modern: The cultures of nationalism in Cyprus. I. B. 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(Original work published in 1967) 84 JOURNAL OF CHILDHOOD STUDIES JANUARY 2023 Vol. 48 No. 1 IDEAS FROM PRACTICE Endnotes 1 The data presented here is part of an 18-month ethnography during which I have spent countless hours at Faneromeni Square and other public spaces in Nicosia, socializing with mostly teenage boys and girls, while regularly participating in their online and offline assemblies, demonstrations, marches, and street parties. I documented this data in my fieldnotes diary. Additionally, I have conducted 30 in-depth individual interviews (17 boys and 10 girls, among which 3 boys were interviewed twice) with youth square regulars, and a great number of informal discussions with older activists of the Cypriot antiauthoritarian scene. Most youth participants were Greek- Cypriots, while some had one parent of migrant background. The youth came from a variety of socioeconomic backgrounds. Ethics approval for this research study was obtained through an ethics review process at the University of Sussex. 2 This text was entitled “Manolis is Alive.” Manolis is the name given to a tree found at Faneromeni Square that youth used to congregate around. The name was then extended by this youth to the whole square, so many times Faneromeni Square would be referred to as Manolis’s Square. The text referenced here was written as a response to authorities’ attempts at framing the square as a place of youth delinquency, drug use, and nuisance to justify interventions to evict the youth community created there. 3 Assixtir was a small street brochure published occasionally by Skapoula that could be produced cheaply and distributed easily. Assixtir is a Turkish word used by both Greek and Turkish-Cypriots that means “fuck off.” _Hlk90046102 _Hlk104804934 _Hlk104807814 _Hlk104472374