Justice for Children and Adolescents: Critical Theory and Anti-Ageist VK Web Communities

This article discusses the production of a critical anti-ageism project. In this case ‘anti-ageism’ is an emic name for a small-scale web community of several readerships and groups that emerged in 2012 in VK social media. Its participants aim to stand against ageism, meaning discrimination against children and adolescents based on their age. Anti-ageists identify themselves as innovators who produce new ways of imagining children’s roles and challenging the social order. In 2015 their rhetorical strategies changed from producing evidence about personal trauma to formulating texts in the technique of critical social theory. The last ones include condemning ageism as a total system, and various situations and social relations as oppression, exploitation, or domination of children and adolescents, whatever the forms in which they occur. With oppression as a key strategically deployed rhetorical trope the discourse of anti-ageist VK web communities invites comparison with the tendencies of the academic and activist critique of dominant and repressive categorical apparatus. At the same time, the anti-ageists redefine the collective understanding of justice by proposing new visions of children’s agency and scenarios of children’s behaviour. The mechanisms of transfer of interpretive techniques of critical theory, especially the choice of cultural allies of anti-ageism, are presented from the perspective of digital ethnography and placed in the context of sociopolitical changes with attention to the material or technological landscapes and the modes of sociality of specific web fragments. The second part of the article demonstrates how anti-ageism is not only articulated on the internet but also embodied in the social imagination of participants in anti-ageist web communities. Transferring the oppression of children and adolescents from a textual motif into a technique that anti-ageists use in imagining and representing themselves and others opens up the prospect for a discussion about the place of critical theory in the scenes of everyday life.