Conference Agenda

Children are growing up in a world in which daily news are dominated by ongoing crises.
Human action continues to breach planetary boundaries, despite urgent calls from
scientists; Russian military and political aggression in Ukraine shows no signs of waning;
the United States, once a global leader for democratic and liberal values, seems to be
falling under an authoritarian regime; in the Middle-East, genocide is being effected under
the ultimately indifferent eyes of the international community. The future seems uncertain
indeed. But what about those who are condemned to live out that future – children? It is
customary to claim that children are the future. But are they, and if so, in what sense?
What do we mean by children and childhoods?

This symposium is built on the conviction that the current future landscape calls for a
return to the fundamental question in educational philosophy and theory, childhood
studies, and related fields: What is a child? Many fundamental educational questions can
be traced back to the question of the child and what ‘a child’ means as opposed to ‘a
human’, or ‘an adult’. Such differentiations define what education should be by shaping key concepts such as socialisation, learning and enculturation. The child has also been a central question in the interdisciplinary field of childhood studies. Efforts to reimagine children as agentive and childhood as socially constructed have inspired the development of subfields connected to geography, history and anthropology.

However, scholarly exchange between different fields has been sparse, despite the shared
interest in children’s lives. This is undoubtedly connected to the somewhat conflicting
ambitions of education and childhood studies. Since its inception in the 1980’s, scholars
within childhood studies have insisted on viewing children as agentic (Oswell, 2013) and ontologically complete beings (Malone, Tesar & Arndt, 2020) – that is, as already fully human, not just becoming human. This has at times been directly framed as critique of educational theorisations of
children and childhood where the focus is – naturally, one might add – on how children
develop and grow towards adulthood. That being said, what education is, how it connects
to notions like development and learning, and what it should actually do about children are
themselves contested questions (e.g. Biesta, 2021; Todd, 2023). At the same time, in the new millennium, developments in both education and childhood studies have drawn attention to
posthuman and new materialistic perspectives, moving beyond (human) children to re-
situate them in complex phenomena in novel ways (e.g., Kraftl, 2020). Despite the differences,
there is a broad range of researchers motivated by a shared concern for children, their
current and future lives, and how adults in various contexts might best respond to those
lives.

The symposium brings together scholars from the fields of philosophy of
education, educational theory and childhood studies to revisit the question of the child.
The contributions in the symposium give a unique response to the question “What is a
child?”, each framing this question differently and connecting it to different sets of related
questions. The selection of contributions represents theoretical, geographical and
disciplinary diversity, thus aiming to address the child question in its full breadth. The
setup of the symposium leaves room for disagreement and offers space for the emergence
of even contradictory perspectives on the same question. It seeks to increase critical
exchange of ideas between scholars who share a concern for children’s lives and the
future.

Sociologists and historians insist that childhood in the modern era is socially constructed. This thesis is often accompanied by an empirical criticism of the developmental account of the growth of the child. The empirical critique, itself, has two forms. A moderate from (advanced by Gareth Matthews) suggests that children can engage in abstract reasoning much earlier than the Piagetian model allows. A more radical critique questions our ordinary assessments of children’s competence in making and acting on judgments for themselves about various issues, including the appropriateness of medical intervention and competence to care for others. Priscilla Alderson points out that frequently children are much better placed than we usually think to contribute to judgments about surgery. The more radical critics suggest complete abandonment of developmentalism; after the age of 5 or 7 or so, we should see children as possessed of a variety of capabilities and capacities, some of which will come to fruition in some circumstances, and others in others. So, for example, Allison James points out that in Norway children working in the fishing industry are judged on their absolute competence, and not on the idea that they are ‘good for their age’; and that “in India, children’s labor provides subsistence needs and ‘is essential to ward off the effect of starvation wages on individuals as well as the families of which they are a part’” (James in Puffall and Unsworth, pp. 34-35). Alderson concludes that we should not ‘think in sharp dichotomies of wise adult/immature child, infallible doctor/ignorant patient, but to see wisdom and uncertainty shared among people of varying ages and experience.” (Alderson, 158). Suppose this critique is right. In that case what should we think about paternalism – the idea that, in general, children should be placed under the power of adults who are charged with acting for the good of those children in ways that we would never tolerate for other adults? Many radical critics think that the falsehood of developmentalism undermines the moral case for paternalism. Conceding (only for the sake of argument) the radical critique of developmentalism, in this paper I’ll argue that paternalism would still nevertheless be justified, on the grounds that it is need for children to enjoy what philosophers call the intrinsic goods of childhood.

Alderson, P. (2008). Young children's rights: Exploring beliefs. Jessica Kingsley Publishers. James, A. (2003) Understanding childhood from an interdisciplinary perspective: problems and potentials. In Pufall, P. & Unsworth, R. (eds) Rethinking Childhood. Rutgers University Press. Matthews, G. (1980). Philosophy and the Young Child. Harvard University Press. Matthews, G. (1994). The Philosophy of Childhood. Harvard University Press.

This paper examines mode, rhythm and tempo related to more-than-human bodies in time to rethink childhood and education in a multispecies world. We are curious about the ways in which the unevenly unjust and unsynchronized Anthropocene expresses itself through temporality, allowing us to ask anew: what is a child? We think about time and mode as not outside descriptors but as ontologically formative. In this view, childhoods are unfolding as rhythmic, multi-layered events rather than a linear progression from present to future. Notions of childhood have always drawn heavily from temporality, whether referring to a protected age category, the immature child in the “waiting room” of the society, or an educational investment in future nation state. In the present environmental condition, a particularly strong refrain is “the future generation”. Children are framed as a generation whose livable world has been stolen in advance, one that deserves being educated to be wiser than us and capable of “saving us” (Sheldon, 2016). From a multispecies point of view, human childhoods are lived with and through generations of other than human childhoods (Hohti & Tammi, 2019). As Kraftl (2020) argues, generations of childhood also entangle with generations of things and materials. The 1950’s Great Acceleration, considered perhaps the clearest marker of the Anthropocene, has evolved into hyper-accelerated capitalist production of materials and technologies, whose mass exceeds all the biomass on our planet (Takkinen & Pulkki, 2023). Recent insights on microbes (Millei et al., 2025) and microscopic particles of plastics and toxins (Kraftl, 2020) are making it evident how child bodies are not bounded and separate from their environments but rather environments and ecosystems themselves. In this presentation, we draw on our previous work among trees, microbes and plastics to engage in experimental thinking around the question of the child in a lively, multitemporal, multispecies world. Following Sparrman’s (2020) “alice” methodology, we “drink” more than human knowledges to playfully enact changes of rhythm (what pattern?), mode (how?) and tempo (how fast?). The aim is to critically move beyond a generalized celebration of relationality and instead foreground details of processes such as capitalist production and slow violence (Nixon, 2011) and how these involve childhoods. We connect the temporal analyses with the notion of the anthropo-not-seen (de la Cadena, 2015) to articulate those more-than-human childhoods that have not only remained out of sight but also been situated in a category of impossibility.

de la Cadena, M. (2015). “Uncommoning Nature.” e-flux, no. 65. https://www.e-flux.com/journal /65/336365/uncommoning-nature/ Hohti, R., & Tammi, T. (2019). The greenhouse effect: Multispecies childhood and non-innocent relations of care. Childhood, 26(2), 169-185. Kraftl, P. (2020). After Childhood: Re-thinking Environment, Materiality and Media in Children’s Lives. Routledge. Millei, Z., Lee, N., Spyrou, S., Roslund, M., Breinholt, A., Tammi, T., ... & Hohti, R. (2025). Child ecologies in a microbial world: A new imperative for childhood studies. Journal of Childhood Studies, 50(1), 34-52. Nixon, R. (2011). Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Harvard University Press. Sparrman, A. (2020). Through the looking-glass: Alice and child studies multiple. Childhood, 27(1), 8-24. Sheldon, R. (2016). The child to come: Life after the human catastrophe. U of Minnesota Press. Takkinen, P., & Pulkki, J. (2023). Discovering earth and the missing masses—Technologically informed education for a post-sustainable future. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 55(10), 1148-1158.

In this paper visual images are used to explore, discuss and challenge what makes a child a child. It elaborates with the today common idea of decentring the child in Child Studies (Spyrou 2019). A decentring of the child focuses on the relational enactments between human (children) and non-human (e.g materiality and ideas) entities. I have argued elsewhere that a de-centring process of the child for the purpose of complexifying what we mean with a child, often forgets to de-centre the aspect being de-centred, the child (Orrmalm et al 2024). The child is taken for granted. I will discuss one photograph from an online child influencer account showing a boy promoting branded fashion objects through what can be identified as a “gangster” or a Grisch look. A well-to-do/well off look promoting upper-class values and richness even though you lack resources yourself. Is he a child? The other pictures discussed are from the retouched serie L’Enfant Exterieur – The Outer Child showing adults with toddler features. According to the artist, Cristian Girotto, the pictures experiment with that: “somewhere inside each of us, there's a young core, instinctive, creative but also innocent and naïve. What would happen if this intimate essence would be completely revealed?” (Girotto, undated). The Outer Child reveals the inner child in the adult and in this process Girotto identifies what toddlerness ‘is’: full faces, sloping shoulders, slightly enlarged heads, pouting mouths, round rosy cheeks and wide-eyed eyes (Williams, 2013). All expressed in faces with adult details such as beard, jewellery, hair and clothes. By identifying the taken for granted aspects of the child, is Girotti not reflecting upon decentring the child? Or does it raise a more prominent question that needs to be asked along with asking what a child ‘is’ – what ‘is’ an adult? A question relevant also for the child influencer picture. To unpack these questions the concepts and the relationality between child and adult need to be investigated. As we rarely talk about ‘the’ adult I want to remove the “the”, and the “a” in front of child to see what, and if, this contributes to a broader discussion and unlearning of what child ‘is’ and can be (cf. Sparrman 2025). This is done for the purpose of possibly including novel or elaborated contemporary concepts of child in child studies theories.

Girotto, C. undated. L'enfant Exterieur. Original artistic work. https://cristiangirotto.com/lenfant-extrieur. Accessed 260128 Orrmalm, A., Sjöberg, J., Sparrman, A., Tiefenbacher, R., Löw, J., Annerbäck, J., Sköld, J., Strid, E. & Hedrén, S. (2024). Centring children in research: a collaborative exploration into child-centredness as method and theory. Child Studies, 6: 11-32. Sparrman, A. (2025). Unlearning the child: an ontological politics outlook. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 57(9), 836-847. https://doi.org/10.1080/00131857.2024.2373774 Spyrou, S. (2019). An ontological turn for childhood studies? Children & Society, 33(4), 316-323. Williams, A (2013). Forever young: Artist creates bizarre portraits that make adults look like toddlers. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2292578/Artist-Cristian-Girotto-creates-bizarre-portraits-makes-adults-look-like-toddlers.html Accessed 260128.

A few months ago, I was sitting in the airplane, on my way to Rutgers University to give a talk on “the best interests of the child” as an educational principle in Finland. On the row behind my back a family with 2-year-old twins were seated. Much to the passengers’ inconvenience, the twins suffered from ear pain and were screaming heartbreakingly loudly most of the 8-hour flight. It made me wonder what “the best interests of the child” —which is the phrase that originates from the United Nations Conventions on the Rights of the Child (“UNCRC”, 1989) and guides or at least should guide many actions and decisions in our society—would be in these circumstances. It was obvious how limited and ostensible the principle of “the best interests of child” was in this case: it focuses on a particular child and does not recognize the surroundings: in this specific case, the sibling with a similar pain, the parents that were tired and soon started to argue, the fellow passengers that were annoyed, the airplane and its material conditions, and the fact that we were 35,000 feet above the ground. The trouble is with the particular child. This paper argues that while children’s rights depend on universal claims to individuality, educational encounters with particular children expose the ethical and conceptual limits of translating singular lives into rights-bearing subjects—just as the situation in the airplane did. Within childhood studies, it has also been pointed out that there is no robust understanding of who “the child” is, which leads to decisions and actions that are based on generalizations and category-based assumptions of “the children” (Krutzinna, 2022). From a theoretical perspective, this implies that conceptualizing a particular child as a fixed or fully capturable entity is a misconception. What makes the examination of individuality and the limits of children's rights particularly timely, is the current context in which climate change, biodiversity loss, and pollution threaten the planet and its inhabitants (United Nations Environment Programme, 2025) and in which human communities are increasingly facing threats to democratic institutions and rising political polarization (Leiviskä et al., 2025). Such challenges call for a reframing of children’s rights beyond traditional individual and human-centred approaches (e.g. Duhn, 2024), toward a perspective that considers broader ecological boundaries, planetary conditions, and, ideally, safeguards rights for the children of future generations.

Duhn, I. (2024). Rethinking children’s rights in relation to planetary rights: A relational perspective in the era of climate change and other crises. Global Studies of Childhood, 15(1), 72–83. Krutzinna, J. (2022). Who is “The Child”? Best Interests and Individuality of Children in Discretionary Decision-Making. The International Journal of Children’s Rights, 30(1), 120–145. Leiviskä, A., Kasa, T., Pyy, I., Kannisto, T. & Zamotkin, I. (2025) Demokratiakasvatus polarisaation ajassa (“Democracy education in a time of polarization”). Gaudeamus. United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC). November 20, 1989, https://www.ohchr.org/en United Nations Environment Programme. (2025). We are all in this together – Annual report 2024. https://wedocs.unep.org/20.500.11822/47082