Futuring practices in and against the unequal distribution of futures

This article examines how children and young people in contexts of deep marginalisation imagine and create possibilities for futures amid structural inequality and institutional abandonment characteristic of racial capitalism. Drawing on ethnographic research in two sites – a participatory project with children in Carcova, an environmentally degraded informal settlement in Buenos Aires, and a collaborative study with unaccompanied migrant children in England – we develop the concept of futuring practices: everyday affective, material, and moral efforts to sustain life and hope under constraint. Through close attention to children's everyday temporal work – the ways they remember, anticipate, and orient themselves towards alternative horizons – we argue that futures, while unequally distributed, are neither entirely foreclosed nor predetermined. Rather than treating children as passive recipients of structurally assigned futures, we foreground their active role in imagining and creating possibilities, attending to the affective, relational, and material practices through which they negotiate the boundaries between what is and what could be.