Editorial: Intergenerational encounters,intersubjective age relations

This special issue introduces a conceptual framework of intergenerational relationality, with the purpose of drawing attention to the question, what exceeds an age's categorical features. In recent interdisciplinary scholarship, wide and diverse range of identities and experiences within different categories of age have been explored. In childhood studies, understandings of children and youth as subjects in their own rights have pushed past a reliance on their existence via their fundamental difference from adults. Another robust literature discusses the ways that categorical power relations embolden adults to exert control onto youth, and the purposes and effects of power relations on the adult and child binary. Despite the sustained and vital arguments foregrounding children and young people's agencies and subjective experiences, these debates have done little to theorize age. In our view, age often remains legible through the same categories that the research started with. That is, by focusing on distinctions, scholarship often renaturalizes age by assuming it as such. As one result, the naturalized position of adults as “non-aged beings” is maintained and reconstructed. To take the study of relational age a step further, this special issue sets out to deflate categorical assumptions of age, and instead proposes that increasing attention is paid to intergenerational encounters and intersubjective age relations.