Ep. 15 Childism, Global South, and Decolonial Sensibilities

In this episode of CCYSC Awaaz, Dr John Wall and Dr Tanu Biswas discuss the history of childism, and how insights from the global south enrich childist thinking. Dr Wall and Dr Biswas talk about their personal and scholarly journeys, research, how childism relates to other ‘isms’ such as feminism and post-colonialism, as well as its close affinity to decolonial sensibilities. 

Dr John Wall is a theoretical ethicist whose research and teaching focus on the groundwork of moral life. He is particularly interested in moral life’s relations to language, power, culture, and childhood. His work falls into three main areas: post-structuralist ethics; political theory; and childhoods and children’s rights. He is the director of the Childism Institute at Rutgers University – Camden (https://www.childism.org/). He is also co-founder of the Children’s Voting Colloquium (https://www.childrenvoting.org/), a worldwide collaboration of child and youth suffrage scholars and activists.

Dr Tanu Biswas is an interdisciplinary philosopher of education who is particularly interested in the philosophical richness that children and childhood offer adults. She is currently working on the educational value of children’s civil disobedience for climate justice for adults. Previously she has researched diverse childhoods in Ladakh (India), Norway and Germany. She teaches as part of the M.A. Intersectionality Studies lecture series at the University of Bayreuth, Germany. For more information on her work visit https://www.tanubiswas.net/

Selected References

Biswas, T. (2020). Little Things Matter Much: Childist Ideas for a Pedagogy of Philosophy in an Overheated World. Munich: Himmelgrün.

Biswas, Tanu (2016): Cultivating simplicity as a way of life: insights from a study about everyday lives of Tibetan-Buddhist child monks in Ladakh. In Christoph Wulf (Ed.): Exploring Alterity in a Globalized World. Abingdon, Oxon, New York: Routledge, pp. 151–164

Josefsson, J., & Wall, J. (2020). Empowered inclusion: theorizing global justice for children and youth. Globalisations, from https://doi.org/10.1080/14747731.2020.1736853.

Wall, J. (2019). From Childhood Studies to Childism: Reconstructing the Scholarly and Social Imagination. Children’s Geographies, 17(6), 1–15

Edited by Nipunika Sachdeva

Music:  Little Idea by Scott Holmes (scottholmesmusic.com) / CC BY-NC