L’insostenibile spinta utopica dei bambini. Oltre il binomio utopia-infanzia

An indissoluble bond holds utopia and childhood together, not only because children are often at the centre of utopian narratives and imaginaries in which they embody salvific roles of corrupt societies – or, specularly in dystopias, that of perturbers of peaceful orders – but because they both evoke promises of radiant futures. Childhood is the symbolic place, the container of our hopes and desires for the future as a society, and utopi a is simultaneously the 'place that is not there' and the 'good place' in which we socially project our aspirations for social change in an ameliorative sense. If this consolidated binomial appears self-evident and thus assumes the force of a "dominant discursive regime", it is true that by examining the production of the adult-centred discourse, and putting the children of the present and everyday life back at the centre of reflection, its explanatory tightness and projective force can become object of scrutiny and rethinking. By analysing the social construction of childhood and the role of children as social actors, this essay proposes a parallelism between utopia and childhood and between everyday utopias and children, showing the links that bind them, but also the repercussions of this link both in children's lives and in the prefigurations of ideal societies to imagine and to actualize.