Symposium: Childism and Decoloniality

Transnational Childism Colloquium

Thursday February 9, 2023, 9:00-11:00 am US ET, Online via Zoom

The figure of the child is central to coloniality. There is a need for critical discussion around a painful lacuna in current scholarship and society, namely, the intersection of adult subordination of the young and colonial subordination of the “non-Western” subject and a corresponding intersection of child and decolonial liberation. In both theory and practice, adultist logics serve the essential colonial function of removing children from their lands and communities by disqualifying them from participation in socio-political life and segregating them into institutions such as schools for the purposes of inculcating a “modern education.” While children from racialized groups continue to be the primary group affected by colonial adultism, there is a need to explore how all human beings designated as children are implicated in the colonial project. At the same time, the actual and figurative “child” stands as a potential site for the formation of just and emancipatory new social imaginations.

https://www.childism.org/projects

Contact Email: tanu.biswas@uis.no

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Program (in US ET)

9:00-9:10 Introduction, John Wall, Rutgers University, US

​9:10-9:40 Panel 1: “The Child” and Coloniality

​Toby Rollo, Lakehead University, Canada

Lucia Rabello de Castro, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil​

9:40-10:00 Open Discussion

10:00-10:30 Panel 2: Politics and Education

Erica Burman, University of Manchester, UK

​Tanu Biswas, University of Stavanger, Norway

10:30-11:00 Open Discussion