WHAT IS CHILDISM?
Childism aims to empower the third of humanity who are children. It is analogous to other critical terms like feminism, in that it responds to young people's marginalized experiences by transforming scholarly, social, and political norms and structures.
Beyond including children and young people as social agents, childism also challenges the historically ingrained adult-centered assumptions that underlie children’s systemic exclusion in the first place. In a similar way to feminism, antiracism, womanism, postgenderism, postcolonialism, decolonialism, environmentalism, transhumanism, and the like, it provides a needed critical lens for deconstructing adultism and patriarchalism and reconstructing age-inclusive practices, advocacy, and thinking.
The concept of childism initially grew out of the interdisciplinary field of childhood studies, but has also crossed over into diverse humanities and social science disciplines. The term itself has been in use since around 2006 (Wall 2006, 2019). As meant here, it differs from earlier uses of the term in literary theory (Hunt 1991) and later uses in psychoanalysis (Young-Bruehl 2011). The difference is that childism in the childhood studies sense views children positively as empowered social beings.
In the humanities, childism in this sense has informed fresh approaches to ethical theory and practice (Rubio 2010, Wall 2010), human rights and social justice (Elkins 2013, Ott 2019), poststructuralist literary studies (Wadsworth 2017), and biblical studies (Parker 2017). In the social sciences, it has been applied in girlhood studies (Mandrona 2016), education (Franck 2017, Warming 2011a), children’s political citizenship (Sundhall 2017, Wall 2008, 2014, 2016), and climate studies (Biswas 2019). In these and other ways, researchers have started to examine children’s lived experiences, not only as important in their own right, but also as raising fundamental questions about larger social systems.
The Childism Institute also builds on similar work coming out of childhood studies such as “childprism research” by Hanne Warming (2011b, 2016a, 2016b, 2018, 2019), the “child as method” approach of Erica Burman (2012 and 2018). It also shares much with other childhood studies concepts such as “generation” in Berry Mayall (2002) and Leena Alanan (2011 and 2016), and work by Spyros Spyrou (2018), Zsuzsanna Millei (2014-15), Laura Gilliam and Eva Gulløv (2017), Niklas Chimirri (2014), Katherine Vitus (2010), and others.
Interdisciplinary Studies
Biswas, Tanu, and John Wall, 2023. “Childist Theory in the Humanities and Social Sciences.” Children & Society, Special Issue on “Childism,” edited by Tanu Biswas and John Wall, 37.4. “Childism is a critical theory or lens analogous to feminism, antiracism, decolonialism and the like that places children's experiences at the centre of inquiry in order to challenge and transform larger social norms and structures” (P. 1001). (see here)
Burman, Erica, 2023. “Child as Method and/as Childism: Conceptual-Political Intersections and Tensions.” Children & Society, Special Issue on “Childism,” edited by Tanu Biswas and John Wall, 37.4. “This article considers the related projects of child as method and childism, as two critical childhood projects attempting to re-engage childhood studies with wider geopolitical arenas” (P. 1021). (see here)
Elkins, Kathleen Gallagher. 2013. “Biblical Studies and Childhood Studies: A Fertile, Interdisciplinary Space for Feminists.” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 29(2):146-53. “Scholarship on “childism,” whether that neologism is used or not, is a promising field of inquiry for feminist biblical scholars.29 John Wall defines “childism” as “the effort to respond to the experiences of children by transforming understanding and practices for all,” analogous to other “-isms” that have expanded and challenged social patterns and structures of knowledge” (p. 152). (see here)
Javelle, Aurélie, Pascale Scheromm and Béryl Muller. 2022. “Ré-enchanter les sols pour les rendre visibles: le regard des enfants en question.” [Re-enchanting soils to render them visible: The children’s perspective.] Projets de paysage. “John Wall (2019) ... revendique de repenser les constructions sociales largement dominées par les points de vue adultes, et qui récuse la présomption de supériorité des adultes sur les enfants, marginalisés car considérés comme des adultes «en devenir» et non pas comme des sujets à part entire.” [English translation: "John Wall (2019) ... emphasizes rethinking the social constructions, which largely dominated by adult points of view, for challenging the presumption of superiority of adults over children who are marginalized due to considering them as adults “in the making” and not as subjects in their own right"] (p. 2). (see here).
Lévêque, Mathilde, "<<Childism>> et <<Enfantisme>>, réflexions sur une notion, une pratique, un engagement." Hypotheses 4 Février 2022. "L’enfantisme peut aussi avoir besoin d’être dit, formulé et théorisé pour se déployer, pour devenir un mouvement autant intellectuel que politique, pour continuer le parallèle avec le féminisme." [English translation: "Childism may also need to be said, formulated and theorized in order to unfold, to become a movement that is as intellectual as it is political, to continue the parallel with feminism."] (see here)
Stirling, Bridge. 2020. "Childhood, Ecological Feminism, and the Environmental Justice Frame." Canadian Studies: Revue interdisciplinaire des études canadiennes en France 88:221-238. "I argue that Canadian ecological feminists must view children as distinct environmental citizens, furthering the interests and needs of both children and women as groups whose voices are often silenced in environmental justice discourses even as they disproportionately bear the weight of environmental harms. By disentangling children from women in our approach to ecological feminism, we make space for the advancement of the interests of both by seeing feminism and childism (WALL, 2019) as allied -isms that can respond to environmental concerns" (p. 222). (see here).
Višnjić-Jevtić, Adrijana, Alicja R. Sadownik and Ingrid Engdahl. 2021. “Broadening the Rights of Children in the Anthropocene.” In: Višnjić-Jevtić, A., Sadownik, A.R., Engdahl, I. (eds) Young Children in the World and Their Rights. International Perspectives on Early Childhood Education and Development, vol 35. Springer, Cham. “Wall (2010) calls this a time for childism, to be understood as an emancipating concept, in comparison with the concept feminism” (p. 256). (see here)
Warming, Hanne, 2020. "Childism." In Dan Cook, ed., The SAGE Encyclopedia of Children and Childhood Studies. SAGE Publications. “Politically, childism puts forward the radical notion that despite differences in age, body size, brain development, experience, and power, children and adults are inherently of equal worth, and children’s perspectives and experiences should thus be considered on the same footing as those of adults” (P. 2). (see here)
Wall, John. 2016. Children’s Rights: Today’s Global Challenge (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers). Uses a childist frame to provide a “systematic overview of the global children’s rights movement … [that] examines key controversies about globalization, cultural relativism, social justice, power, economics, politics, freedom, ageism, and more.” (see here)
Wall, John. 2019. “From Childhood Studies to Childism: Reconstructing the Scholarly and Social Imaginations.” Children’s Geographies, 17(6):1-15, special issue edited by Hanne Warming on Society and Social Changes through the Prism of Childhood. “This article proposes a new lens or prism called childism for critiquing the deeply engrained adultism that pervades scholarship and societies and reconstructing more age-inclusive research and social imaginations” (P.1). (see here)
Wall, John. 2022. "Childism." In Oxford Bibliographies in Childhood Studies, online publication, ed. Heather Montgomery (New York: Oxford University Press, February 2022), approx. 15 pages. “Childism is a theoretical framework aimed toward enabling children’s experiences to change scholarship and societies.” (see here)
Wall, John. 2023. “Childism: Transforming Critical Theory in Response to Children.” In Sarada Balagopalan, John Wall, and Karen Wells, eds., Bloomsbury Handbook of Theories in Childhood Studies (New York: Bloomsbury, 2023), 208-222. (see here)
Education
Abebe, Tatek and Tanu Biswas, "Rights in Education: Outlines for a Decolonial, Childist Reimagination of the Future." Fennia. 2021, 199 (1), 118-128. "We identify and discuss aspects of learning that educational research, policies and institutions can consider, addressing the needs and subjectivities of learners and activating a politics around rights in education ... [and] we outline four strategies of moving forward with a decolonial, childist lens of reimagining education as community formation" (P. 118). (see here)
Arculus, Charlotte and Christina MacRae, 2022. "Clowns, Fools and the More-than-Adult Toddler." Global Studies of Childhood, 1-15. "At a time when neo-liberal education policies place children at ever younger ages into institutional care and education settings, we wonder what is opened up when we take seriously toddler/ clown practice in early childhood education. We advocate experimenting with toddler/clown methods and practices, and exploring what these messy, disruptive time-spaces might equally do for us to transform some of our tragic adult tendencies" (P. 220). (see here)
Biswas, Tanu, 2021. "Letting Teach: Gen Z as Socio-Political Educators in an Overheated World." Frontiers in Political Science 3(641609):1-11. "[A]n integral dimension of reflexivity in further developing childist educational theory and praxis, entails a conscious commitment to letting children and youth teach adult educators too" (P.1). (see here)
Biswas, Tanu, 2021. "Who Needs Sensory Education?" Studies in Philosophy and Education, 1-16. “[B]eing-with-children can enable philosophical clearings for adults to re-cognise plural temporalities, as opposed to a singular clock-time perception of Time." (see here)
Biswas, Tanu, 2022. "Decolonial Childism: Nurturing Diversity for Intergenerational Sustainability." The Childhood Law and Policy Network (CLPN), Queen Mary University of London. “We have been co-reflecting on connections between education and global intergenerational sustainability to develop a perspective we name 'decolonial childism'.” (see here)
Biswas, Tanu, 2023. "Becoming good ancestors: A decolonial, childist approach to global intergenerational sustainability." Children & Society, Special Issue on "Childism," edited by Tanu Biswas and John Wall, 37.4. “A decolonial childist approach would particularly maintain caution that sometimes traditions need to be challenged to promote progressive social change, redress the intersectional, hierarchical relations between classes, genders and generations, exclu-sive injustices towards ethnic minorities, the differently-abled and resolve conflicts between ethnic and religious groups” (P.1011). (see here)
Biswas, Tanu and Nikolas Mattheis, "Strikingly Educational: A Childist Perspective on Children's Civil Disobedience for Climate Justice." Education Philosophy and Theory 54.2 (2021):145-157 “A childist philosophical attitude that emphasises mutual teaching—i.e. the adult capacity to see and hear what children show and say—can expand through an engagement with, rather than against school strikes” (P.145). (see here)
Borg, Farhana and Karin Sporre, "Children's Empowered Inclusion in Early Childhood Education for Sustainability." Stacy Lee DeZutter, ed., International perspectives on educating for democracy in early childhood: recognizing young children as citizens (New York: Routledge 2023), pp. 260-278. “What empowered inclusion could mean in the recognition of children as citizens with democratic rights who can influence their daily life and activities in preschool” (P. 260). (see here)
Dodge, Janine. 2022. “PARS Playwork: Considering Who We Are Becoming and Why.” International Journal of Playwork Practice, 2(1), Article 1. “The PARS model of playwork practice is explicitly based on the philosophy of ‘childism’ (Wall, 2007, 2022). This describes how adults ‘take the perspective of the experiences and concerns of childhood’ (Wall, 2007, p. 52) when interacting with children” (p. 4). (see here)
Franck, Olof. 2017. “Highlighting Ethics, Subjectivity and Democratic Participation in Sustainabiltity Education: Challenges and Contributions.” In Ethical Literacies and Education for Sustainable Development: Young People, Subjectivity and Democratic Participation, edited by Olof Franck and Christina Osbeck, 1-17. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. “In this chapter the challenge of developing democratic education for sustainability, where the aim is not that the students will be fostered into taking specific moral positions but rather that they will become aware of the right to deliberately choose ethical actions and strategies as moral and social subjects, is highlighted… “Childist approach” can be developed with reference to research done in preschool contexts, where young children interact with each other and with teachers, shaping teaching-learning processes that reach into epistemological and pedagogical, as well as ontological and existential, fields” (P. 1-12). (see here)
Furu, Ann-Christin, Angel Chan, Jonna Larsson, Ingrid Engdahl, Sarah Klaus, Anna May Navarerete, and Barbara Turn Niskač, 2023. "Promoting Resilience in Early Childhood Education and Care to Prepare Children for a World of Change: A Critical Analysis of National and International Policy Documents." Children 10.716:1-14. “Connections and contradictions between national and international discourses were interpreted using the theoretical perspectives of childism and place-based education to gain a broader picture of how resilience is or is not expressed and how it can be supported in ECEC with respect to the mounting sustainability crisis” (P.6). (see here)
Luna, Sara Michael, 2021. "Challenging Norms in Pre-Kindergarten Curriculum by Listening to Young Children: Pre-Service Teachers' Lessons in Phonological Awareness." International Critical Childhood Policy Studies (2021) 8(2):80-91. "As childism would suggest, curriculum writers, early childhood teacher educators and researchers should ... listen for the ways that children challenge the social norms and values" (P.89). (see here)
Murris, Karin and Walter Kohan. 2021. “Troubling Troubled School Time: Posthuman Multiple Temporalities.” International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 34:7, 581-597. “Until fairly recently, decolonization has tended to focus on racism, sexism, classism, and ableism only, and not on childism or ageism. What we propose instead, is that decolonization is a disposition of thought - the logic of childhood is the logic of colonialism. Decolonizing childhood requires a troubling of the experience of time in educational institutions, because (as we will show) the clockbound work of schools involves the subordination and denigration of children and childhood.” (p. 2-3). (see here)
Toscano, Maurizio and John Quay. 2022. “How dare you! When an Ecological Crisis Is Impacted by an Educational Crisis: Temporal Insights Via Arendt.” Educational Philosophy and Theory. 55. 1-11. “SS4C (the School Strike for Climate) may be representative of a new form of ‘childist’ political agency, in contrast to conventional ‘adultist’ political structures” (p. 2). (see here)
Social Sciences
Bacon, Kate, and Zoe O'Riordan. 2023. “Who Do You Think You Are? Children's Definitions of Being a ‘Child’.” Children & Society, 37, 1136–1155. “The term ‘childism’ … is more commonly used in CS to mean respect for children, with ‘adultism’ being used to denote prejudice against children (Alderson, 2020; Wall, 2022). If there is to be widespread and meaningful participation of children in society, then children (and adults) need a language for recognising the skills and competencies that children have” (p. 1138). (see here)
Barajas, Sebastian, 2021. "Unearned Advantages? Redefining Privilege in Light of Childhood." Children's Geographies 19. "A childist analysis … challenges the concept of privilege to reconsider its assumption that disadvantaged people are forced to earn their advantages, whereas privileged people are not” (P.10). (see here)
Biswas, Tanu, and Eriksen, Thomas Hylland, 2024. Children as Environmental Actors - A Generational Perspective on Climate Activism in an Overheated World. Routledge Handbook for Childhood Studies and Global Development. (see here)
Biswas, Tanu, Eleonora Florio, Letizia Caso, Ilaria Castelli, and Serena Iocabino. 2024. "The Adultcentrism Scale: A Potential Contributor to Advancing Children's Participation Rights in Nordic Contexts." Social Sciences 13(5), 238 (see here)
Biswas, Tanu, and Liola Nike Mattheis. 2024. "Developing Disobedience: A Decolonial Childist Perspective on School Strikes for Climate Justice." American Behavioral Scientist 0(0). (see here)
Biswas, Tanu. 2023. Review of Penny Weiss, Feminist Reflections on Childhood: A History and Call to Action. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Hypatia, 1-4. “Adultism refers to the marginalization and oppression of children and youth, whereas childism refers to efforts aimed at overcoming adultism by transforming social and scholarly norms” (p. 1). (see here)
Demiral, Seran, 2021. "Children's Power to Challenge Authority." Society Register 5(2):99-114. "Childism can be understood through ... “[s]tandpoint theory,” which has the potential to transform the subaltern into a competent subject for its own sake. According to their population, children have the characteristic of minority groups, just like women in the face of male-centrism or all people from peripherical places against several anglophone countries in the world" (P.101). (see here)
Josefsson, Jonathan, and John Wall. 2020. “Empowered Inclusion: Theorizing Global Justice for Children and Youth.” Globalizations, 17(6):1043-1060. “Childism suggests that cultural alliances must be made, not only through greater global openness to diverse expressions, but also through the active and intentional joining of forces with women, minorities, the poor, and other globally marginalized parties” (P.1056). (see here)
Köhler, Lennart. 2018. "Children's Health in Europe - Challenges for the Next Decades." Health Promotion International, Volume 33, Issue 5, October 2018, Pages 912–920. "The concept of ‘childism’ ... sees children not only as key objects of studies but as actively involved in constructing their own lives and the societies in which they live, accepting them as equal human beings and complete citizens, including full voting rights from the beginning .... These principles from philosophical, ethical and political sciences, guiding us ahead from children’s needs to their rights, may be helpful in creating a broad humanistic basis also for commitment in children’s health." (see here)
Liebel, Manfred. 2024. "La resistencia de la niñez trabajadora a la discriminación por edad. Reflexiones sobre el adultocentrismo, la temporalidad y la condición infantil." Revista Sociedad e Infancias 8(2). "Neste contexto, o autor refere-se ao conceito de adultismo como uma caraterística fundamental de uma sociedade em que os adultos determinam a forma como os jovens devem viver e em que as crianças são impedidas de participar de forma significativa. O artigo explora as formas particulares de discriminação contra as crianças trabalhadoras e descreve as formas específicas como estas a vivem e a que resistem." (see here)
Mannion, Gregory. 1999. Children’s Participation in Changing School Grounds and Public Play Areas in Scotland. Ph.D Dissertation, University of Stirling, Scotland. Childism is defined in analogy to feminism as “the move to recover the child as active agent, citizen, and cultural participant” (P. 203). (see here)
Mattheis, Nikolas. 2022. "Making Kin, Not Babies? Towards Childist Kinship in the "Anthropocene." Childhood, 29(4): 512-528. "Some of the questions [Donna] Haraway raises [about the Anthropocene] – especially on the possibility of a non-natalism that is not anti-child – can benefit from childist answers, or reframings. Instead of romanticizing lip service to being “pro-child”, Harawayian thought on kinship could just use a dose of childism" (P.522). (see here)
Morales, Santi and Marta Martínez Muñoz, Adultocentrismo: ¿Qué piensan chicas y chicos? (Octaedro, 2024). "«La palabra adultocentrismo no está en el Diccionario», se lee en el portal web actualizado de la Real Academia Española. Podríamos pensar que no resulta llamativo, ya que su uso es un hecho relativamente reciente. Más allá de su ausencia en el diccionario, sobre lo que no hay dudas es sobre su presencia en la vida cotidiana. Hay adultocentrismo en las aulas escolares, en la crianza familiar, en el diseño e implementación de políticas públicas (o en la ausencia de estas), incluso en las zonas de juego de los parques infantiles en cualquier ciudad del mundo. Esta obra ofrece los resultados de un estudio exploratorio basado en casi 200 testimonios de chicas y chicos procedentes de Argentina, México, España, Chile y Colombia, entre otros países. A partir de sus modos propios y de sus éticas infantiles y juveniles, comunican sus deseos de mejorar las relaciones intergeneracionales, sus inquietudes y su buen criterio. Este libro es una invitación a visibilizar esta evidencia y, sobre todo, a escuchar pensamientos infantiles y juveniles acerca del tema." (see here)
Morrison, Fiona. 2023. "Theoretical Grounding on Children's Participation in Research on Maltreatment." Roth, M., Alfandari, R. and Crous, G. (Ed.) Participatory Research on Child Maltreatment with Children and Adult Survivors (Emerald Studies in Child Centred Practice), Emerald Publishing Limited, Bingley, 13-26. “The chapter discusses the sociology of childhood, tracing how it brought a focus to children's participation in research, and introduces the concepts of adultism and childism to help critique children's participation in research on maltreatment.” (see here)
Newstead, Shelly. 2016. De-constructing and Reconstructing the unorthodox recipe of playwork. Doctoral Thesis, Human Development and Psychology, London, Institute of Education, University College London. “This study takes a new approach to the age-old problem of a unique identity for playwork by treating it as a collective and historical problem… This deconstruction of the historical playwork primary sources rediscovered the lost philosophy of the adventure playground pioneers, and this was used to develop the P.A.R.S. (Playwork Action Research System) model of playwork practice.” (see here)
Rizzini, Irene, "Más allá del adultocentrismo: acción intergeneracional en defensa de los derechos de niños, niñas y adolescentes" ["Beyond adult centrism: intergenerational action in defense of the rights of children and adolescents"], Revista Sociedad e Infancias 8(2). "El artículo presenta una perspectiva crítica e innovadora al demostrar que, a pesar del adultrocentrismo resaltado en las investigaciones latinoamericanas, el papel protagónico de los jóvenes activistas tiene el potencial de desestabilizar las relaciones de poder desiguales entre generaciones en los espacios de toma de decisiones públicas y de remodelar esas relaciones de forma más igualitaria." (see here)
Stirling, Bridget. 2022. “Childhood, Futurity, and Settler Time.” Canadian Children, 47(3), 34–46. “…feminist and childist discourses on care and relationality and children… attempt to reinterpret childhood, not as adulthood’s other, but rather as a particular type of social position within a network of interdependence and relationship” (p. 40). (see here)
Warming, Hanne, 2022. "Society and Social Changes through the Prism of Childhood: Editorial." Children's Geographies 2022, Vol. 20, No. 3, 253-256. “We dive into the how these fields (children’s geographies and child-hood studies) contribute to broader debates, by elaborating on the three approaches, namely childhood prism research, childism, and child as a method” (P. 254). (see here)
Philosophy
Biswas, Tanu and Toby Rollo. 2024. "confronting adultcentrism: childist and decolonial interventions in educational philosophies and institutions." childhood & philosophy 20:1-11. (see here)
Biswas, Tanu and Enaya Mubasher. 2023. “Arriving at a Question: Retrospections on Post-qualitative Slow Research with Children.” Global Studies of Childhood, 13(3), 276-289. “Recent childist interventions in posthumanist thought (Mattheis, 2022), adult-critical amendments to political philosophy and decolonial theory (Rollo, 2016), the troubling of adult-centric knowledge structures (Imoh, 2023; Sparrman, 2023) and the inclusion of childism in policy research on place-based education (Furu et al., 2023) are some examples what turning the collective concern to confronting adultism can reveal about the importance of recognizing children and childhood from adult-critical standpoints.” (p. 277). (see here)
Biswas, Tanu. 2022. “What takes “us” so long? The philosophical poverty of childhood studies and education.” Childhood, Copenhagen, Denmark, 29(3), 339–354. “Scholarship at the overlaps of philosophy of education, decoloniality and childism points to the exclusion of childhood and related oppressed positionalities in Western philosophy of education and its subdiscipline-philosophy of childhood …” (p. 393). (see here)
Biswas, Tanu, 2019. Little Things Matter Much: Childist Ideas for a Pedagogy of Philosophy in an Overheated World (Büro Himmelgrün Munich, 2020). An investigation of childism and planetary/economic overheating that asks, “What is the scope for the philosophical blossoming of adults when they enter children’s playfully constructed worlds as guests?” (see here)
Biswas, Tanu, John Wall, Hanne Warming, Ohad Zehavi, David Kennedy, Karin Murris, Walter Kohan, Britta Saal, and Toby Rollo, “Childism and Philosophy: A Conceptual Co-Exploration.” Policy Futures in Education 2023, 0(0), 1-19. “We have learned to think about childism with greater plurality, that is, as childisms” (P.2). (see here)
Cassidy, Claire. 2021. “Philosophy with Children as and for Moral Education.” In: Mendonça, D., Franken Figueiredo, F. (eds) Conceptions of Childhood and Moral Education in Philosophy for Children. Kindheit – Bildung – Erziehung. Philosophische Perspektiven. J.B. Metzler, Berlin, Heidelberg. “Childism is not like other -isms such as sexism or racism, though it implies some form of discriminatory behaviour toward children. Such -isms are negative in focus. Instead, childism has a positive orientation, as used in the likes of feminism, postcolonialism or environmentalism (Wall, 2019). Childism is one way of recognising children by ‘grant[ing them] full humanity precisely as children’ (Wall, 2010, p.23); without doing so, all humanity is diminished” (p. 7). (see here)
Graham, Anne, and Antonia Canosa, John Wall, and Nigel Patrick Thomas, “Child Safe Organizations and the Ethics of Empowered Inclusion.” Children & Society, 00, March 2023: 1-18. “children's safety and well-being are viewed as primarily dependent on an ethics of what could be called mutual recognition or empowered inclusion” (P. 15). (see here)
Haynes, Joanna; Costa Carvalho, Magda. 2023. “An open-ended story of some hidden sides of listening or (what) are we really (doing) with childhood?” Childhood & Philosophy, 19, pp. 1-26. “Wall uses the term ‘childism’ similarly to feminism, to convey the transformative sense of recognition of children’s historical exclusion and the need to re-create social systems in the light of children’s ways of doing and being” (p. 17). (see here)
Hedegaard, Maria Louise Larsen, 2024. "Rethinking the democratic role of education through childism." childhood & philosophy 20:1-29. (see here)
Murris, Karin and Jayne Osgood. 2022. “Risking Erasure? Posthumanist Research Practices and Figurations of (the) Child.” Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, 23(3), 208-219. “There is a remarkable silence about ‘age’ and childism as exclusionary, ironically even in the posthumanism literature” (p. 212). (see here)
Ott, Kate. 2019. “Taking Children’s Moral Lives Seriously: Creativity as Ethical Response Offline and Online.” Religions 10, pp. 525-37. “Childist ethics reminds us to encounter these children as they are, at the age they are, as complete moral beings” (P.11). (see here)
Saal, Britta, 2020. "The Children's Polylogue - Doing Philosophy with Children in Intercultural Encounters." Polylog - Journal for Intercultural Philosophizing (2020), 1(7):55-69. "The concern of my paper is twofold: 1) to implement a childist perspective in doing intercultural philosophy and 2) to show one possibility of doing philosophy with children interculturally" (P.57). (see here)
Saal, Britta, 2023. “Enlightening through Children: Playing and Thinking Together in New Ways.” Children & Society, Special Issue on “Childism,” edited by Tanu Biswas and John Wall, 37.4. “The critical childist widening of enlightenment reads as follows: Have the courage to use your own understanding and at the same time to be open to new experiences and to trust your sensations and feelings. In short: Have the courage to use your own heart-mind” (P. 1061). (see here)
Snir, Itay, 2024. "Childism and Minority Cultures in School." Childhood & Philosophy. "Childist critiques tend to point to school as a place where adultism is not only conspicuous but also (re)produced. In this article, however, it is argued that the public school, obviously founded by adults for adult purposes, has an important childist dimension." (see here)
Sporre, Karin, Heila Lotz-Sisitka, and Christina Osbeck. 2022. "Taking the Moral Authorship of Children and Youth Seriously in Times of the Anthropocene." Ethics and Education January: 1-16. "Education potentially has a supportive and enabling role in fostering moral authorship and putting it into settings for deliberation, enrichment, further engagement via the creative agency displayed within moral authorship itself" (P. 14). (see here)
Wall, John. 2013. “Childism: The Challenge of Childhood to Ethics and the Humanities.” In Anna Mae Duane, ed., The Children’s Table (pp. 68–84). University of Georgia Press. “What childism suggests is that diverse disciplines should not only work across normative boundaries but also open themselves up, in the process, to decentering and transforming their own disciplinary norms” (p. 72). (see here)
Wall, John, 2010. “‘Aint I a Person?’ Reimagining Human Rights in Response to Children.” Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics 30.2 (Fall 2010), pp. 39-57. “The essay is an exercise in what is broadly termed "childism": not just applying ethical norms to children but restructuring norms themselves in light of children's experiences.” (see here)
Wall, John. 2010. Ethics in Light of Childhood (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press). A comprehensive development of the concept of childism as it transforms ethical theory and particular approaches to human rights, family life, and other issues. (see here)
Wall, John. 2008. “Human Rights in Light of Childhood.” International Journal of Children’s Rights 16.4, pp. 523-543. “This essay argues that children’s rights will adequately transform societies only when the very concept of ‘human rights’ is reimagined in light of childhood. In this case, human rights would be understood as grounded, not in modernist ideas of autonomy, liberty, entitlement, or even agency, but in a postmodern circle of responsibility to one another” (p. 523). (see here)
Literature
Chawar, Ewa, et al., 2018. "Children's Voices in the Polish Canon Wars: Participatory Research in Action." International Research in Children's Literature, 11.2:111-131. "[W]e believe that [the field of children's literature] can embrace a more radical form of childism by paving the way towards child-inclusive humanistic methodologies. Such approaches could transform prevalent norms and strategies for reading literature and become a model of academic practice aimed at promoting intergenerational cohesion and counteracting antichild prejudice" (P.114). (see here)
Deszcz-Tryhubczak, Justyna and Macarena García González, 2023. “Thinking and Doing with Childism in Children’s Literature Studies.” Children & Society, Special Issue on “Childism,” edited by Tanu Biswas and John Wall, 37.4. “We argue that childism may remain a productive starting point for further openings in children's literature and culture studies and childhood studies if it becomes a plural and messy notion that questions the discourse of hope for a better future as defining children's lives” (P.1037). (see here)
García-González, Macarena. 2024. “Decolonising Reading Lists in the Age of AI: an Essay at the crossroads of Decoloniality, Childist Criticism and Chat GPT.” La Palabra, núm. 48, e18310. (see here)
García-González, Macarena. 2022. “Towards an Affective Childist Literary Criticism." Children’s Literature in Education 53(3), 360–375. “Childism aims to challenge epistemological orders as feminism has done … Childist literary criticism is, therefore, inspired by feminism and by feminist literary criticism” (p. 361, 363). (see here)
Joosen, Vanessa. 2022. “Connecting Childhood Studies, Age Studies, and Children’s Literature Studies: John Wall’s Concept of Childism and Anne Fine’s The Granny Project.” Barnboken, 45. “Opposing definitions of the term “childism” illustrate the need for more dialogue between childhood studies, age studies, and children’s literature studies” (p. 16). (see here).
Kuecker, Elliott. 2022. “'Somethings About Me': Slanted Conventions in Children’s Letters to Beloved Authors." Journal of Childhood Studies, 47(2), 50–67. “Researchers obtain information about children’s everyday lives by partnering with children to collaborate on research, or asking them to create documents or art for the sake of their research, rather than using archives. Some examples of this great work include Pia Christensen’s (2004) participatory ethnography, John Wall’s (2019) notions of “childism,” and Michael Armstrong’s (2006) child-written narrative inquiries.” (p. 53). (see here)
Moore, Amber. 2018. "'I Knew You Were Trouble': Considering Childism(s), Shame Resilience, and Adult Caretaker Characters Surrounding YA Rape Survivor Protangonists." New Review of Children's Literature and Librarianship, 24:2, 144-166. Four pieces of young adult literature are examined to "suggest that how parent and school-based professional characters impact survivor protagonists is directly correlated with if, or the degree to which, the grown ups participated in “positive” or “negative” childism" (P. 144). (see here)
Wadsworth, Sarah. 2015. “The Year of the Child: Children’s Literature, Childhood Studies, and the Turn to Childism.” American Literary History 27(2):331-341. A review of several books in literary studies that identifies a move in the field toward a kind of “childism” concerned with “reconstructing worlds in response to differences” of “generation and stage of life.” (see here)
Religion
Betsworth, Sharon, and Parker, Julie Faith. 2022. "Where Have All the Young Girls Gone?": Discovering the Girls of the Bible through Childist Analysis of Exodus 2 and Mark 5–7.” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, 38(2), 125-141. “Combining tools of narrative analysis with childist hermeneutics, the authors show that girls in the Bible are more prevalent and powerful than commentators and readers often realize” (p. 125). (see here)
Dalton, Russell W. 2024. "Engaging Childist Biblical Interpretation and Reading Studies to Enhance Children’s Bible Lessons." Religious Education, 119.1: 31-42. "By engaging the growing movements of childism and childist biblical interpretation, as well as studies in how children read and understand the Bible, religious educators can better facilitate and guide children in Bible lessons that are driven by the children themselves and that better connect to their life contexts, experiences, and felt needs."
Garroway, Kristine. 2018. “2 Kings 6:24-30: A Case of Unintentional Elimination.” Journal of Biblical Literature 137(1):53-70. “Childist interpretations most often bring a multidisciplinary approach to the text, combining sociohistorical criticism, gender theory, literary theory, and various anthropological theories.10 Childist readings might also consider how the archaeological record and ethnographic studies can aid our understanding of the child in biblical Israel” (P. 55). (see here)
Garroway, Kristine and John W. Martens. 2020. Children and Methods: Listening to and Learning from Children in the Biblical World (Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill). “This collection of essays proposes that while the various lenses of established methods of higher criticism offer insight into the lives of children, by filtering these methods through the new field of Childist Criticism, children can be heard and seen in a new light.” (see here)
Grobbelaar, Jan. 2020. "Doing Theology with Children: A Childist Reading of the Childhood Metaphor in 1 Corinthians and the Synoptic Gospels." HTS Theological Studies 76(4)a5637:1-9. “This article contributes to the enhancement of emancipatory methodologies for doing theology and research with children by exploring the different ways in which the childhood metaphor is used in 1 Corinthians and the Synoptic Gospels through a childist reading of the relevant texts” (P.1). (see here)
Johansson, Katarina. 2021. “Att erkänna barnet som teologiskt subjekt: Childism, asymmetri och Axel Honneths erkännandeteori.” [Recognizing the child as a theological subject: Childism, asymmetry and Axel Honneth's recognition theory.] Dissertation. “Childism is the radical notion that children are human beings” (p. 35). (see here)
Kohlhaas, Jacob. 2022. “Nurturing Masculinities: Constructing New Narratives of Fatherhood.” Journal of Moral Theology 11 (SI2): 33–57. “John Wall’s advocacy of “Childism” provides a further resource for a more reflexive model of parenthood freed from concerns of policing gendered boundaries” (p. 54). (see here)
Murray Talbot, Margaret. 2022. “Theories and Methods for Transitioning Children.” In Why Jephthah's daughter weeps: A child-oriented interpretation. Biblical interpretation series. “The chapter argues that research in childhood studies—on children, the sociology of childhood, and child–adult relationality—reveals presuppositions that underlie a child–adult binary. It then examines developments in childist and child-oriented biblical scholarship”. (see here)
Ngqeza, Zukile, 2025 "Bidding with our daughters: Re-reading Judges 11 through the lens of childism." Verbum et Ecclesia 46(1) (see here).
Parker, Julie Faith and Kristine Henriksen Garroway. 2020. “Introduction.” Biblical Interpretation, 28(5), 533-539. “We conclude by offering the reasons why childist biblical interpretation matters not only for the study of children in the biblical world but for children in the modern world as well.” (see here)
Parker, Julie Faith. 2020. “Hardly Happily Ever After: Trafficking of Girls in the Hebrew Bible.” Biblical Interpretation, 28(5), 540-556. “This childist interpretation further maintains that these portrayals of girls being trafficked have multiple troubling commonalities, with each other and with human trafficking today.” (see here)
Parker, Julie Faith. 2017. Valuable and Vulnerable: Children in the Hebrew Bible, especially the Elisha Cycle. Providence, RI: Brown Judaic Studies. “Childist biblical interpretation encourages resistant reading of both the Bible and commentaries, replacing the tendency to ignore child characters with focused attention on them” (P. 199). (see here)
Parker, Julie Faith. 2019. “Children in the Hebrew Bible and Childist Interpretation.” Currents in Biblical Research 17(2) 130–157. “Since the word ‘childist’ is still new to many in the academy, I discuss the origin of this term, define it, and urge its adoption. Most of the article assesses scholarship on children in the [Hebrew Bible], with an emphasis on publications that have emerged recently as well as works forthcoming” (P. 130). (see here)
Parker, Julie Faith, 2023. “Engaging studies of children in the Bible: What is going on and why you should care.” Children & Society, Special Issue on “Childism,” edited by Tanu Biswas and John Wall, 37.4. “This article shows what childist biblical studies contribute to the wider movement of childism and securing children's rights” (P. 1066). (see here)
Wall, John. 2006. “Childhood Studies, Hermeneutics, and Theological Ethics.” Journal of Religion 86.4, pp. 523-548. Suggests that “in an analogous way to women’s and environmental studies, childhood studies should not only apply existing theological methods and norms but also challenge and transform them… I call this approach ‘childism’” (P. 523). (see here)
Wall, John, 2007. “Fatherhood, Childism, and the Creation of Society.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 75.1 (March 2007), pp. 52-76. “A childist approach to fatherhood is not just about fatherhood itself but also about larger human and social norms. It teaches us about ethical life” (P. 70). (see here)
Woolever, Susan. 2023. “Bearing Witness: Pregnant Teens, Hagar, and Christian Social Ethical Responses.” Available from ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global. “The notion of moral agency has been closely aligned with autonomy. Feminist, womanist, and childist scholars have worked effortlessly to shift this paradigm. We can and must “affirm autonomy while interpreting it through relationships” (p. 41). (see here)
History
Sandin, Bengt. 2020. “History of Children and Childhood—Being and Becoming, Dependent and Independent”. The American Historical Review, Volume 125, Issue 4, 1306–1316. “’Childism,’ ... aim to redirect the study of children and childhood in a more critical vein that can ‘respond to the lived experiences of the third of humanity who are children through the radical systemic critique of scholarly, social, and political norms’ (as Wall’s Childism Institute discusses above) or through the concept of child rights governance as a way of incorporating agency, politics and policy, and different disciplinary approaches” (p. 1315). (see here)
Politics and Law
Alminde, Sarah, 2024. "Listening to Children: A Childist Analysis of Children's Participation in Family Law Cases." Social Sciences 13(3):1-13, Article 133. "The paper argues ... that 'listening emergent' to children can offer a path to deconstructing the norms and structures that undermine and exclude children’s views—and thus offer a childist contribution to childhood research." (see here)
Grover, Sonja, John Wall, and Robin Chen, 2023. “The Legal Case for Children’s Right to Vote in the United States." International Journal of Children’s Rights, 31(4):791-810. "[B]arring the right to vote according to age neglects children’s democratic interests, harms societies, and is discriminatory" (see here).
Josefsson, Jonathan. 2019. "Non-Citizen Children and the Right to Stay: A Discourse Ethical Approach." Ethics & Global Politics, 12(3):32-49. "Building on Seyla Benhabib’s concepts reciprocity and democratic iterations, this article develops a discourse theoretical approach that offers an alternative framework to a legalistic approach for the normative analysis of the rights of non-citizen children" (p. 32). (see here)
Mitchell, Kerry L., and Tracey Colville. 2022. “Can You Hear Me? An Exploratory Study Investigating the Representation and Impact of Children’s Views in Multi‐agency Meetings.” Children & Society, 36(4), 472–493. “Childism has been described as a ‘critical movement’ aimed at challenging normative assumptions in society around constructions of child-adult relations” (p. 474). (see here)
Maldonado Castañeda, P. H. 2024. Activismo Ambiental y Democracia Deliberativa. Una Aproximación desde el enfoque del children´s capabilitarianism y el childism. Las Torres de Lucca. Revista Internacional de Filosofía Política 13(2), 107-118. (see here)
Preclik, Christopher-David, 2024. "From Geroncratic Rule to Political Adultism: The Experiential Bias in Germany's Aging Electoral Democracy and the Limitations of a Vote 16 Policy," Statistics Politics and Policy 15(2): 137-167. (see here)
Rosen, Rachel and Katherine Twamley, 2018. "Introduction. The Woman-Child Question: A Dialogue in the Borderlands." In Feminism and the Politics of Childhood, edited by Rachel Rosen and Katherine Twamley 1-20. London: UCL Press. Discusses the complex relation of childism to feminism and concludes that "the cause of feminism and the cause of childism should be foundational tenets of all critical intellectual endeavours and political movements, regardless of the constitution of their membership or the causes that they pursue" (p. 18). (see here)
Shorey, Holly, 2023. Teaching a New Dog Old Tricks? An Analysis of How Current Legislative and Non-Legislative Approaches Address Opportunities for Realising Children's Civic Participation Rights through the Digital Environment. A Dissertation Submitted to the Brussels School of International Studies of the Kent Law School. "Digital citizenship is proposed as a tool to shape recommendations for future law, policy, and practice that aims to move beyond reproducing adultism." (see here).
Snir, Itay, 2023. "The Children Who Have No Part: A Rancièrian Perspective on Child Politics." Critical Horizons: A Journal of Philosophy and Social Theory, 00:1-17. “In this paper, I develop the possibility of Children’s political struggle for equality, informed by the political philosophy of Jacque Rancière. I present the educational backdrop for Rancière’s claim that all intelligences are equal, and argue that it implies that children are by nature equal to adults, hence also equally capable of political action” (P. 43). (see here)
Sporre, Karin. 2021. "Young People - Citizens in Times of Climate Change? A Childist Approach to Human Responsibility." Theological Studies 77(3):1-8. "Through a review of 'childism' as suggested by Wall (2010), the aim of this article has been to point to a theoretical ethical framework whereby it can be recognized how contemporary matters of climate change are given existential and ethical significance by children and young people" (p. 7) in eight schools in Sweden and South Africa. (see here)
Sundhall, Jeanette. 2017. “A Political Space for Children? The Age Order and Children’s Right to Participation.” Social Inclusion 5(3):164-171. “Childism is about being able to redefine the political landscape. The example of the Gothenburg Youth Council is not about changing the legislation or rephrasing policies but about the right to belong under the same conditions as adults and to be involved in defining what should count as politically important” (P. 170). (see here)
Wall, John, 2014. “Democratizing Democracy: The Road from Women’s to Children’s Suffrage.” International Journal of Human Rights, Special Issue, edited by Sonja Grover (2014) 18.6: 646–659. “It argues that minor enfranchisement requires postmodern rather than modern conceptions of democratic inclusion and revised understandings of voting rights as such” (P. 646). (see here)
Wall, John. 2014. “Why Children and Youth Should Have the Right to Vote: An Argument for Proxy-Claim Suffrage.” Children, Youth and Environments, Vol. 24, No. 1, pp. 108-123. “This article examines recent debates about extending the right to vote to children and youth under the age of 18. It uses postmodern political theory to argue that concerns about children’s insufficient capabilities and potential to harm themselves and others are unfounded, and that, except in the earliest years, the right to vote for minors would promote the full and just functioning of democracies.” (see here)
Wall, John, 2019. “Theorizing Children’s Global Citizenship: Reconstructionism and the Politics of Deep Interdependence.” Global Studies of Childhood (March 2019) 9(1): 5-17. “This article argues that attending to children’s experiences through a lens of childhood studies or childism opens up the possibility for more complex and profound theorizations of global participatory citizenship for all, both children and adults” (P. 5). (see here)
Wall, John, 2021. “Childhoods as Normative Reconstructions.” Section in collective writing project edited by Marek Tesar on “Infantographies,” Educational Philosophy and Theory (2021), 54.3: pp. 5-6. “While I agree that childhoods are socially constructed, I would interpret this to mean, not that they are value-neutral social positions, but that they are contested sites of political change. The question must be asked: socially constructed by whom and for what purpose? For this reason, I prefer to think of children and childhoods as normative reconstructions” (P. 6). (see here)
Wall, John. 2022. Give Children the Vote: On Democratizing Democracy. New York: Bloomsbury Academic. “It develops a detailed childist theory of voting based on holding elected representatives maximally responsive to the people's different lived experiences.” (see here)
Wall, John. 2022. “Children’s Rights and Voting Age Discrimination.” Harvard Human Rights Journal, online. “I argue that discrimination against children needs to be met with a systemically childist critique that can illuminate societal adultism and reimagine rights, such as the right to vote, beyond a regime of biases around age.” (see here)
Wall, John. 2023. "The Case for Children's Voting." In Wall, John, ed., Exploring Children's Suffrage: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Ageless Voting. Palgrave Macmillan. “It argues that children’s suffrage considerations demand more critically childist democratic theory, aligning such theory with the deeper democratic aim of holding representatives as responsive as possible to the lived experiences of the people.” (see here)
Wall, John. 2023. “Adultism and Voting Age Discrimination.” Harvard Human Rights Journal (2023) 36: 329-340. "By showing how age discrimination against children is systemic, this Essay aims to make the case for a broad, normative adultist analysis of policy and law." (see here).
Warming, Hanne. 2013. "Theorizing Trust-Citizenship dynamics." In Hanne Warming, ed., Participation, citizenship and trust in children’s lives (London, UK: Palgrave Macmillan), pp. 10–31. “This chapter explores how sociological theories of trust can contribute to a dynamic and critical understanding of children’s participation and citizenship within the new sociology of childhood paradigm.” (see here)
Zehavi, Ohad. 2018. “Becoming-Woman, Becoming-Child: A Joint Political Programme.” In Feminism and the Politics of Childhood, edited by Rachel Rosen and Katherine Twamley 241-256. London: UCL Press. Suggests that “childism” “sets the task for the revolutionary politician of childhood to theoretically and practically construct the means for children to speak out for themselves, in their own name, and be properly heard” (P. 250). (see here)
CHILDIST-LIKE RESEARCH
Alanen, Leena. 2011. “Critical Childhood Studies?” Childhood 18(2):147-50. Argues that childhood studies must be more critical, and must take a normative turn towards critiquing child essentialism and improving children’s lives. (see here)
Alanen, Leena. 2016. “‘Intersectionality’ and Other Challenges to Theorizing Childhood.” Childhood 23(2):157-61. Suggests that age/generation should be for childhood studies what gender is for feminism. (see here)
Burman, Erica. 2012. "Deconstructing neoliberal childhood’: towards a feminist antipsychological approach." Childhood: a global journal of child research, 19, 4: 423-438. “This article analyses child development as text to highlight newly emerging contemporary tropes of northern, normalized childhoods in relation to gender, racialization and familial organization.” (see here)
Burman, Erica. 2018. "Child as method: anticolonial implications for educational research," International Studies in the Sociology of Education. “This paper advances an approach, ‘child as method’, as a resource for interrogating models of development in childhood and education.” (see here)
Chimirri, N. A. 2014. Investigating media artifacts with children: Conceptualizing a collaborative exploration of the sociomaterial conduct of everyday life. Roskilde: Roskilde Universitet. “The dissertation’s aim is to explore the everyday relevance media artifacts have for young children and thereby counter one-sided interpretations which either understand media to determine children’s behavior and actions or vice versa.” (see here)
Cordero Arce, Matías. 2015. “Maturing Children’s Rights Theory: From Children, with Children, of Children.” International Journal of Children’s Rights 23:1-49. Argues against a form of adultism that constructs children’s rights as either adult protections or borrowed participations, claiming that genuine children’s rights should be understood instead critically as political rights for children’s “emancipation,” that is, their full and anti-oppressive power to define and enact their rights for themselves.
Deszcz-Tryhubczak, Justyna, "Thinking with Deconstruction: Book-Adult-Child Events in Children's Literature Research," The Oxford Literary Review 41(2):185-201. "We need the force of such unanticipatable and irruptive (auto)- deconstructive events13 to disrupt our current practices and orientate ourselves to doing research with and not about children’s ecoliterature and with and not about young readers14 as a way towards collective intergenerational ventures addressing contemporary environmental issues." (see here)
Deszcz-Tryhubczak, Justyna, et al., 2019, "Productive Remembering of Childhood: Child-Adult Memory-Work with the School Literary Canon," Humanities 8(74):1-13. "This essay, co-written by adult and child researchers, marks an important shift in the field of children’s literature studies because it promotes an academic practice in which children are actively involved in decision-making. In our polyphonic account of the collaboration, we draw on the ideas of productive remembering, re-memorying, and child-led research to advance a new pedagogical approach to the current, adult-centered literary school canon in Poland, which was compiled in 2017 by a panel of politically appointed experts." (see here)
Florio, Elionora, Letizia Caso, and llaria Castelli, "The Adultcentrism Scale in the Educational Relationship: Instrument Development and Preliminary Validation." Measures adultcentrism in adults around factors of “Child as an empty box,” “Child without agency,” and “Competent Child.” (see here)
Gilliam, L. & E. Gulløv. 2017. Children of the Welfare State. Civilising Practices in Schools, Childcare and Families. London: Pluto Press (Anthropology, Culture & Society). “Children of the welfare state explores the civilizing processes embedded in child‐rearing practices in kindergartens, schools, and families in Denmark.” (see here)
Josefsson, Jonathan. 2017. “We beg you, let them stay.” Childhood 24. No 3:316-332. “This article uses a number of cases discussed in Sweden’s largest morning paper to analyse claims of asylum-seeking children and how these claims challenge the normative limits of contemporary asylum, concerning what and who ought to be recognized by law… The article suggests that the claiming of rights as a socio-political practice could be a vital analytical approach to studying children’s rights and offers a much needed alternative to the dominant mainstreaming paradigm.” (see here)
Kohan, Walter Omar, and Barbara Weber, eds., Thinking, Childhood and Time: Contemporary Perspectives on the Politics of Education (Lexington Books, 2020). "This book works toward a paradigm shift in our experience of childhood: To perceive the philosophical and political dimensions of childhood and education." (see here).
Lindholm, Sofia K. and Wickström, Anette. 2020. “‘Looping Effects’ Related to Young People’s Mental Health: How Young People Transform the Meaning of Psychiatric Concepts.” Global Studies of Childhood 10(1): 26–38. “The present article draws on ‘the minority voices’ of young people and theories developed by Ian Hacking to undertake a critical analysis of the conceptualisation of young people’s mental health… We demonstrate how the participants gave new meaning to these psychiatric labels, devalued and gave nuance to them, and by doing so transformed them into cultural categories rather than diagnostic categories.” (see here)
Mandrona, April. 2016. “Ethical Practice and the Study of Girlhood.” Girlhood Studies 9(3):3-19. Explores how children’s experiences transform conceptions of “sex and gender since girls and young women bring unique voices to creative and cultural expression and also interact with social spaces in particular ways.” (see here)
Mayall, Berry. 2002. Towards a Sociology for Childhood. Philadelphia, PA: Open University Press. “As gender emerged as key to understanding social relations between women and men, generation is emerging as key to understanding relations between childhood and adulthood.” (see here)
Moosa-Mitha, Mehmoona. 2005. "A Difference-Centred Alternative to Theorization of Children’s Citizenship Rights." Citizenship Studies, 9(4), 369–388.
Murris, Karin. 2013. “Reading the World, Reading the Word: Why Not Now Bernard is Not a Case of Suicide, but Self-killing.” Perspectives in Education 31(4): 85-100. “Philosophical teaching assumes a relationship of ’emptying’, not ‘filling’, and a conscious effort from the teacher to resist the urge to regard education as a formation of childhood. My argument will be supported by a transcript of a dialogue I facilitated with nine-year-olds discussing Bernard’s apparent suicide in David McKee’s picturebook Not now Bernard.” (see here)
Murris, Karin. 2016. The Posthuman Child: Educational Transformation through Philosophy with Picturebooks. New York: Routledge. “The idea of the book is to show educators how philosophical enquiries with children can bring about educational transformation. … Part I very much focuses on the ‘why’ of my particular philosophical approach to teaching and learning and curriculum construction. This is followed in Part II with more practical ideas of what childhood education from a posthumanist perspective looks like in the classroom.”
Murris, Karin. 2018. “Posthuman Child and the Diffractive Teacher: Decolonizing the Nature/Culture Binary.” In A. Cutter-Mackenzie et al., eds., Research Handbook on Childhoodnature. Springer. “This chapter shows how critical posthumanism as a navigational tool offers a different relational ontology – more akin to African Indigenous scholarship and ways of living – that reconfigures subjectivity and brings into existence the notions of posthuman child and the sympoietic diffractive teacher (human or nonhuman) – critically urgent notions to consider for education in the Anthropocene.
Rollo, Toby. 2016. "Democracy, Agency and Radical Children's Geographies." In Richard J. White, Simon Springer and Marcelo Lopes de Souza, eds., The Practice of Freedom: Anarchism, Geography, and the Spirit of Revolt Volume. Rowman and Littlefield. pp. 235-255. "From the perspective I have briefly outlined above, the role of the intel- lectual in confronting empire, settler colonialism, hetero-patriarchy, white supremacy and neo-liberal capitalism is to articulate the ways in which adults can work with children to recover relations of care and mutual aid. We do this not by incorporating children into adult institutions but, rather, by removing obstacles to the exercise of childhood agency in order to reinvent institutions" (p. 250).
Rollo, Toby. 2018. "Feral Children: Settler Colonialism, Progress, and the Figure of the Child." Settler Colonial Studies 8(1):60-79. From the Abstract: "I argue that civilizational progress and settler colonialism are structured according to the opposition between politics governed by reason or faith and the figure of the child as sinful or bestial. Thus, it is not contingent, but rather necessary that justificatory frameworks of European empire and colonialism depict Indigenous peoples as children ... [so that] the theoretical link between Indigenous peoples and children emerges not as a simple analogy, but rather, as the source of the premodern/modern and savage/civilized binaries."
Spyrou, Spyros. 2018. Disclosing Childhoods: Research and Knowledge Production for a Critical Childhood Studies. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Argues in part that “it is through a more radical decentering of the child that childhood studies might reinvigorate its research agenda and engage more critically with the wider empirical and theoretical worlds of knowledge.” (see here)
Swart, Ignatius and Yates, Hannelie. 2012. Listening to Africa’s children in the process of practical theological interpretation: A South African application.” Hervormde teologiese studies 68(2), p.1-12. DOI:10.4102/hts.v68i2.1310. “As part of the theological task of developing a publicly oriented ministry that will do justice to the social plight of children in Africa, this article adopted as its point of departure an appreciation of the new ‘hermeneutics of listening’ that is advanced today by an interdisciplinary movement of scholars from the disciplines of practical theology, theological ethics and religion studies.” (see here)
Vitus, Kathrine. 2010. “Waiting Time: the de-subjectification of children in Danish asylum centres.” Childhood – A global journal of child research, vol.17(1): 26-42. “This article analyses the relationship between time and subjectification, focusing on the temporal structures created within Danish asylum centres and politics, and on children’s experiences of and reactions to open-ended waiting.” (see here)
Warming, Hanne. 2011. “Inclusive Discourses in Early Childhood Education,” International Journal of Inclusive Education 15(2):233-47. “This article explores the discursive formation of inclusion in early childhood education and after‐school (recreation) centres in a Danish municipality.” (see here)
Warming, Hanne. 2011. “Getting under their skins? Accessing young children’s perspectives through ethnographic fieldwork.” Childhood 18 (1): 39-53. “[I]n order to represent young children’s perspectives in an ethically sound manner, it is necessary to combine the ‘voice approach’ with ethnomethodological insights and critical sociological analysis, which together enable ‘critical sociological empathy’.” (see here)
Warming, Hanne. 2018. “Children’s Citizenship in Globalised Societies.” In Theorising Childhood: Citizenship, Rights and Participation. Baraldi, C. & Cockburn, T. (eds.). Palgrave Macmillan, p. 29-52 24 p. “I argue that the main medium in a theoretical prism enabling a context-sensitive analysis of children’s citizenship in globalised societies is the suggested spatially aware, lived citizenship approach that pays special attention to the preconditions for recognition and trust.” (see here)
Warming, Hanne. 2020. “Childhood prism research: an approach for enabling unique childhood studies contributions within the wider scholarly field.” Children’s Geographies https://doi.org/10.1080/14733285.2020.1787952. “This article outlines a childhood prism research program with a view to encouraging unique childhood research contributions to the wider scholarly field… making use of the fact that childhood can constitute an extreme or paradigmatic case and can therefore potentially offer a diffractive sociological microscope on certain issues.”
World Health Organization. 2021. "Global Report on Ageism." Within a discussion of ageism toward older people, this report also contains a section exploring ageism against younger people too. (see here).
Zehavi, Ohad. 2010. “Minoracy,” Mafte’akh: Lexical Review of Political Thought 1e pp. 37-49 (translated from Hebrew). “Minoracy is political action aimed at undermining the forces of oppression, resisting the powers of authority, escaping the inevitability of violence. Minorians seek to relieve themselves of the aggression they exert on others and to neutralize, as much as possible, the violence exercised on themselves and on others through society’s dominant norms. ” (see here)