Listen to the interview with John Wall on Childism, Transforming Culture, and Giving Children the Vote
Where Does Empowerment Or De-Humanization Begin? Where Is Sovereignty Learned?
Listen to John Wall, PhD, talk with Dave Metler, Kindred’s social justice editor, and Lisa Reagan, Kindred’s editor, about the international discussions, research, and insights into childism.
“I think most children are aware of the ways in which they get silenced and written out and disempowered and those kinds of things. I don’t think most children necessarily have the language and the social structures around them to just support that idea. But I also don’t think women did either pre-feminism. So I think it’s actually very much the same idea. I also compare it to anti-racism that someone experiencing racism has always experienced racism in one way or another, even if they didn’t know the word racism or anti-racism.” – John Wall, PhD, founder of the Childism Institute, Rutgers University, from the Kindred podcast interview.
Resources
“So long as I do not firmly and irrevocably possess the right to vote I do not possess myself.” – Martin Luther King, Jr.
The Childism Institute. The Childism Institute aims to stimulate childist research across the academy, test and evolve the concept of childism, and inform childist social and political justice activism.
The Children’s Voting Colloquium. The Children’s Voting Colloquium is a global collaboration of researchers, activists, child-led and adult-led organizers, policy-makers, and others dedicated to eliminating voting discrimination according to young people’s age. While we hold a diversity of positions on how our aims may be achieved in practice, and while we recognize that different solutions may be appropriate in different contexts, we seek to support and stimulate one another and to catalyze a broader movement for truly universal suffrage, whether through full voting rights for all, lowered voting ages, proxy votes, or some combination thereof.