Laura Ishiguro

Laura Ishiguro, “Growing Up and Grown Up … in Our Future City” : Discourses of Childhood and Settler Futurity in Colonial British Columbia. B.C. Studies, Summer 2016.

In this fascinating article, Laura Ishiguro argues that children were essential to a “settler futurity” that was “the very foundation of settler colonialism”.   Illustrating how British child migrants to BC were essential to the colonial imagination of the future, Ishiguro weaves together multiple fields, including the history of migration, the history of settler colonialism and the history of childhood, to cast light on a previously neglected feature of BC history.  The article is methodologically and theoretically ambitious in its close and careful reading of some of the tentacles of imperialism as they spread through policies, practices, and lives of families.  Overall Ishiguro offers a sophisticated and suggestive analysis of the important role childhood played in colonial settlements and the imagining of the future of colonial space.