A Political Space for Children? The Age Order and Children’s Right to Participation

Abstract

This article discusses how adulthood is naturalized and how adulthood norms set limits on the possibilities of including children in democratic processes and understanding them as political subjects. The article examines the kind of resistance children and youth can meet when participating in democratic processes, with examples of speech acts from the Gothenburg Youth Council. It also discusses the theoretic concept of childism (Wall, 2008(Wall, , 2010 and how childism can be a way to escape the dominance of adulthood norms. The concept of childism means addressing children's experiences by transforming understandings and practices for all humans, not only for non-adults. How is it possible to create a political space for children and involve children in defining what should count as politically important?

Letting Teach: Gen Z as Socio-Political Educators in an Overheated World

“…The 2-fold reason I do so is firstly because school strikes for climate reveal that schools are no longer only a site for educating future citizens, but a site of political resistance and of exercising new forms of democratic participation of pupils as citizens in the present (Holmberg and Alvinius, 2020). Secondly, the adultist resistance to Gen Z protestors, that I have presented in the previous section, reveals what childist readings of children's political participation have already shown i.e., adulthood norms set limits on children's political participation (Sundhall, 2017). By childism here, I refer to a philosophically critical way of being, knowing and doing that emerges in the early 2000s as a result of the critical turn in the overlapping Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian tradition of childhood studies, which very recently can be seen as crystalizing through a call for stronger relational ontologies from an intergenerational perspective (e.g., Wall, 2010Wall, , 2019Spyrou, 2018;Spyrou et al, 2019;Biswas, 2020).…”

“…Childism means addressing children's experiences by deconstructing and transforming social structures for all humans (Sundhall, 2017;Wall, 2019), and hence demands that adults must simultaneously allow themselves to be critically addressed by children (e.g., Biswas, 2020). Tools for deconstructing the naturalization of adulthood as Wall (2019) and Sundhall (2017) have argued are not provided by "childism" itself, rather examples such as Gen Z's proactive socio-political participation through civil disobedience that enable adult childist theorists to further evolve tools for deconstruction and reconstruction of adultist norms, which in this paper I restrict to a discussion of socio-political education.…”

“…Even these alternative approaches seem to implicitly treat the figure of the child as the "default addressee of pedagogy." Theoretical accounts of childist understandings of political participation (e.g., Moosa-Mitha, 2005;Lister, 2007;Wall, 2012;Sundhall, 2017;Bray and Nakata, 2020) have also not yet been discussed as part of relatively comprehensive theoretical overviews on citizenship education (e.g., Ribeiro et al, 2017). The difference is that childist understandings underscore the roles that childadult power dynamics play in the normative fabric of democratic society, as well as endeavor to imagine how democracy can be transformed to include children.…”

The Right to the City in the Platform Age: Child-Friendly City and Smart City Premises in Contention

“…In fact, these and other issues seem even more pressing today, yet, which (political) direction to go is contested and ongoing. Particularly, where children are concerned, and which are underrepresented in emerging rights-based trajectories of digital and urban development [26,[90][91][92][93]. Having said this, a child-focused rights trajectory-for those under age 18-emerged from the United Nations (UN) Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), adopted by the General Assembly in 1989, which in hindsight, coincided with the beginning of the Internet [44].…”

Introduction to the Issue: “Promoting Children’s Participation in Research, Policy and Practice”

“…Similarly, Banham, Allan, Bergman and Jau's (2017) examination of child inclusive conferences in Family Courts in Western Australia reveal that Courts need to balance the benefits to children of being involved more directly and the potential risk to them of participation and that 'it is not always in the child's best interest to give their views' (p. 6). Sundhall (2017) argues that, in Sweden, it is precisely the influence of these kinds of decisions-of what she describes as 'adulthood norms' (p. 1)-that limit young people's involvement in democratic processes, and that ultimately make her question whether it is possible to create dedicated political spaces for children and young people. In Scotland, there is a legal obligation to provide additional support for learning in schools and yet, as Swanson, Hong-Lin and Mouroutsou (2017) show, mathematics education is too often underpinned by 'social constructions of ability' that have led to inferior education for some children and limited opportunities for their voices to be heard.…”