Children Society - 2022 - Deszcz Tryhubczak - Thinking and Doing With Childism in Children S Literature Studies

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Accepted: 16 July 2022
DOI: 10.1111/chso.12619
ORIGINAL ARTICLE
Thinking and doing with childism in children's

literature studies
Justyna Deszcz-Tryhubczak1 | Macarena García-González2
1
Faculty of Letters, Institute of English
Studies, University of Wrocław, Wrocław, Abstract
Poland In this article we share our reflections on how childism
2
Center for Advanced Studies on has enabled us to navigate theoretical assumptions shap-
Educational Justice, Pontifical Catholic
University of Chile, Santiago, Chile
ing our field and develop new positions and research
practices fostering child–adult interdependencies. Justyna
Correspondence Deszcz-Tryhubczak has relied on childism as a frame-
Justyna Deszcz-Tryhubczak, Faculty
of Letters, Institute of English Studies, work for the introduction of participatory research with
University of Wrocław, Wrocław, Poland. young readers as a way for advancing child–adult collab-
Email: justyna.deszcz-tryhubczak@uwr.
oration. Macarena García-González has deployed child-
edu.pl
ism to think about adultism and its analogies to sexism.
Funding information Although we offer a critique of childism as an essentializ-
Chilean Government
ing concept, we also show how for both of us it has served
as a gateway towards other approaches, and especially
post-anthropocentric understandings both of texts, readers
and the world and of our critical engagements. Finally, we
argue that childism may remain a productive starting point
for further openings in children's literature and culture
studies and childhood studies if it becomes a plural and
messy notion that questions the discourse of hope for a
better future as defining children's lives.
KEYWORDS
childist criticism, children's literature and culture, new materialist
feminism, participatory research, posthumanism
INTRODUCTION
In 1984, Jacqueline Rose published The Case of Peter Pan, Or The Impossibility of Children's Fiction,
which continues to be conspicuously present in theorizations of children's literature. Rose's main
© 2022 National Children's Bureau and John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
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2 DESZCZ-TRYHUBCZAK and GARCÍA-GONZÁLEZ
argument was that literature addressed to children is actually about and for adults as its purpose is to
build ‘an image of the child inside the book’ in order to ‘secure the child who is outside the book, the
one who does not come so easily within grasp’ (1984, p. 2). The Case of Peter Pan has been predom-
inantly read as urging children's literature scholars to focus on dismantling ideological constructions
of childhood, while it has also been criticized for declaring it to be ‘impossible’ for adults to transpose
themselves into children. David Rudd (2010) points out to how, ironically, Rose holds on to a residual
notion of the Romantic child by considering that children are such a distinct group from adults that
they stand outside society and language. Post-Rose research includes studies by the Reading Group
(e.g. Lesnik-Oberstein, 1994; Lesnik-Oberstein & Thomson, 2002), for which discussions about real
children amount to new constructions of childhood, and Maria Nikolajeva's theory of aetonormativ-
ity (2009, 2010), according to which children's literature centres on adult normativity, thereby reflect-
ing real-life child/adult power imbalances. More recently, Clémentine Beauvais developed the concept
of the mighty child (2015); that is, the child that potentially subverts the aetonormative order through
possessing the future inaccessible to the adult. Diverse as these approaches are, they rely on the binary
between the child and the adult, thereby failing to examine the full spectrum of child–adult relation-
ships in children's literature and in real life, especially in light of the importance of intergenerational
bonds as crucial for the survival of contemporary societies (Deszcz-Tryhubczak & Jaques, 2021).
While working on this article, we noticed that 1984 also saw the emergence of another impor-
tant theoretical approach to children's literature: ‘childist criticism’, proposed by Peter Hunt, which
gave rise to a theoretical countercurrent where ‘the adult and the child coexist in an egalitarian way’
(Chapleau, 2009, p. 164). Hunt argued that young readers' multiple individual responses to literature
should inform adults' critical practice as a way towards a more accurate understanding of ‘reading as
a child’ in particular cultural contexts (1984, p. 45). Hunt suggested that if we agree that interpreta-
tions of texts often do not conform to authors' intentions, “we might find that the four current kinds
of reviewing and evaluation of children's books (‘children might like…’, ‘children should like…’,
‘children do like…’, ‘children will like…’) are all equally suspect” (1984, p. 44) as based solely on our
assumptions about young readers. These assumptions, as Hunt insisted in his Criticism, Theory, and
Children's Literature, need to be challenged through ‘rereading of texts from […] a childist point of
view’ (1991, p. 143), which means, as he stressed, a realistic appreciation of what an adult critic does
when dealing with children's books and child reader: ‘it is the critics who ultimately make the books’
and ‘create the intellectual climate which produces the text’ (1991, p. 143). Children, on the other
hand, may have freedom of choice but they can choose only ‘from what there is there to be chosen’
(1991, p. 143).
Hunt's ideas did not prove as influential as Rose's in the decades to follow but they inspired a
number of innovative insights into the concepts of the child and childhood that can be seen as attempts
to counteract the adultism prevailing in children's literature studies. Our article has two aims: first,
we discuss what childism has meant in our field and exemplify it with our research practice; second,
we critique childism for how it essentializes the child and adult and argue that it should be expanded
to address both human and more-than-human relationalities that produce childhood and adulthood.
We conclude with a speculation on how a pluralistic understanding of childism may generate further
openings in children's culture studies.
DESZCZ-TRYHUBCZAK and GARCÍA-GONZÁLEZ 3
THE CHILDIST THOUGHT IN CHILDREN'S LITERATURE

SCHOLARSHIP
Before we provide an overview of childist children's literature studies, we would first like to present
Peter Hunt's recent comments on the childist approach, which he kindly supplied on our request.
Hunt's observations are pertinent as some critics have misinterpreted the idea of childist criticism
either as ‘an attempt by adults to read as children would’ (Nodelman, 2008, p. 156) or as ‘pay[ing]
heed to specific attributes of children as readers’ (Reynolds, 2011, p. 128). The former is also how it
has been understood by John Wall, who thus writes of childist criticism: ‘On this view, adults can more
complexly interpret children's literature by putting aside their adult biases and reading from children's
own points of view’ (2019, p. 6). However, as Hunt explains in ‘Childist Criticism Revisited’ (2021):
To dismiss the intended audience of a text as irrelevant seemed to me to be self-evident

nonsense: the audience was essential to the critical process. The difficulty was assumed
to be that the child's, or a child's, or any child's—theoretical or actual—perception or
response or understanding was unknowable. Or, rather, that critics (and other adults
involved with children's texts) could arrogantly make decisions (as they do now) about
what the/a/any child would or could like/understand—or, implicitly, what they should
like or understand.
What I wanted to do was to hand the power, at least nominally, to the child readers. As
anyone who has any contact with actual child readers will know, it is impossible, beyond
certain limited denotative responses, to know what they understand from a text: all we
know is that it is probably not what a skilled reader would understand. The idea of ‘child-
ist’ criticism was not to speculate on, or assume, what a child reader—however defined,
but usually defined by relative inexperience—would understand, but to acknowledge that
understanding was different, and individual, and to a large extent, unknowable.
Such an approach, of course, makes all adult judgements of children's books – all adult
discussion of them, redundant – which rather awkwardly raises the question of why crit-
ics should draw a salary. It also directly confronts the elephant in the room of most
criticism and theory (at that historical point): we might admit that we cannot know what
a child is thinking, but we are much less likely to admit that we do not know what an
adult is thinking, either. There might be narrower limits to ‘misreadings’ when dealing
with peer groups of readers, but they are there: is there a text in this class? If we object
to assuming that children, as a group, take certain shared meaning from texts, why do we
not do the same with adults?
(Hunt, 2021, unpublished data)
It is owing to the above-mentioned misinterpretations of the goals of childist criticism that it

has not been implemented in practice. For Kimberley Reynolds, it has been ‘more of a position than
a methodology’ (Reynolds, 2011, p. 54). Moreover, a number of children's literature scholars have
relied on Elisabeth Young-Bruehl's (2012) understanding of childism as a prejudice against children
without acknowledging its affirmative potential (Joosen, 2013; Nance-Carroll, 2021), which we see
as symptomatic of our field's acceptance of the child–adult binary as the default form of intergenera-
tional relations.
Nevertheless, the affirmative understanding of childism as suggested by Hunt gave rise to some
important theoretical discussions that challenge adultist criticism. Childist orientation continued with
Karen Coats's insistence on developing approaches involving interactions with real children based on
love, and not on exploitation, as the core of child–adult relations (Coats, 2001, p. 143). For Andrew
Melrose, a children's book ‘is as close as we can get to a critical, visual, literary and literal hug and to
miss this point is to miss the function of the book and the potential it has in the nurturing process, and
in making connections’ (Melrose, 2012, no page). Engaging directly with Hunt's arguments, Sebastien
Chapleau addressed the very viability of the concept of children's literature: it should refer only to ‘the
process of production’ (‘the writing of children's literature’); whereas, ‘[a] children's book can never
be—it can only become’ (2009, p. 65). Hence, what may exist is a “‘child's literature’” (2009, p. 65)
or children's literatures defined by ‘the individuality of the child’ at a given moment (2009, p. 65).
Chapleau saw this possibility as ‘the here and now at the heart of childist criticism’ (2009, p. 65). He
also wondered what a childist criticism of childist criticism itself would be (2009, p. 150); that is, how
children would understand and comment on such academic concerns. Although he did not propose a
methodology allowing for the emergence of children's own critical practice, his question may be seen
as an opening towards participatory approaches to studies of children's literature(s). Finally, Chapleau
stressed the paradigm-shifting potential of childist criticism: through its destabilizing the institution
of children's literature, it could challenge broader social and cultural norms defining childhood and
adulthood.
An especially important contribution to the childist thought has been made by Mary Galbraith,
who in her ‘Hear My Cry: A Manifesto for an Emancipatory Childhood Studies Approach to Chil-
dren's Literature’ proposed to see childist children's literature studies as part of a general emancipatory
project of childhood studies, centred on ‘a commitment to understanding the situation of babies and
children from a first-person point of view, exploring the contingent forces that block children's full
emergence as expressive subjects, and discovering how these forces can be overcome’ (2001, p. 188).
Galbraith emphasized that this emancipatory model should develop across academic disciplines and
society in general as a result of ‘finding ways to admit childhood desires, experience, and predic-
aments into all practices of the human community […]’ (2001, p. 194 italics in the original text).
Hence she advocated a systemic change that could lead to a thorough societal transformation, and in
particular to raising individuals aware of the need for ‘an emancipatory model’ in which ‘adults look
for ways to reenter and reevaluate their own childhood experience as part of a personal emancipatory
human project as well as a larger project to be with, support, and negotiate conflict with children
without oppressing them’ (2001, p. 188–189). Childhood studies and children's literature scholar-
ship may support this goal by centring on intergenerational dependencies. For Galbraith, ‘the central
emancipatory question with respect to childhood is not how children can escape from adults, but how
children and adults might enact dialogue within a relationship where one partner is intensely vulnera-
ble and capable of suffering but developmentally dependent and relatively inarticulate’ (2001, p. 190).
Searching for such a dialogue may be channelled through children's literature as it both represents ‘the
existential predicament of childhood in an adult-dominated world’ and contains schemata and motifs
close to experiences of both children and adults (2001, p. 200). As Galbraith stressed, although her
approach ‘endorses Hunt's childist project’, it is nevertheless substantially broader as it sees an explo-
ration of the emancipatory elements of children's literature as a way of mobilizing interdisciplinary
reflection on childhood–adulthood connectivities (2001, p. 198).
A number of scholars working with the childist criticism have also explored theoretical and
practical possibilities of appreciating children as creators of children's culture and of including texts
produced by them into the remit of children's literature studies. David Rudd developed the notion of the
constructive child to acknowledge the abundant literatures produced by children—a proposition that
has opened up a possibility of children's literature as something else than an element of culture created
by adults for young audiences. As Rudd argued, ‘the fact that children are seen not to have a stake in this
[the creation of children's literature] is […] a product of the way children's literature (in its texts and its
criticism) has become institutionalised, such that—ironically—only commercially published work is
seen to count; or, to put it another way, only adults are seen to ‘authorise’ proper children's literature’
(Rudd, 2005, p. 19). He then suggested that scholars in the field contribute to ‘this culturally dominant
version of events’, thereby implying the necessity to develop childist methodologies informed by what
Chapleau referred to as respect for all childhood cultures (2009, pp. 76, 83). Peter E. Cumming also
argued for the presence of children's ‘voices, worldviews, cultures, and reading and writing practices’
in children's literature studies, which, as he hoped, would potentially both ‘destabilize’ and ‘enrich
adult academic study of children's literature’ (2008, p. 106). However, for Cumming, this transfor-
mation is not likely to happen not just because ‘children remain second-class citizens, members of a
sub-species of the human race’ (2008, p. 106), but also because of the difficulty of determining what
kind of children's writing is worth studying. Cumming further asked how we should study it: ‘As a
window for adults into the secret corners of children's lives? As an interrogation of adult-authored
literature and adult power? As a fundamental challenge to the traditional production and reception of
children's literature?’ (2008, pp. 106–107). Therefore, for Cumming, the childist approach could be
about ‘adult readings informed by children's readings’ that take place in the exploration of children's
writings as ‘part of a mutual enterprise between child and adult reader’ (2008, p. 108). Such ventures
may ‘empower child writers and readers’ without disempowering adults: as Cumming explains, ‘it
is surely not necessary to disempower (but merely to humble) adult readers’ (2008, p. 108). Such a
perspective is a reasonable addition to the childist criticism and its focus on intergenerational dialogue.
Research following this direction can be found in Karen Sánchez-Eppler's Dependent States: The
Child's Part in Nineteenth-Century American Culture (2005), Marah Gubar's Artful Dodgers: Recon-
ceiving the Golden Age of Children's Literature (2009), a special issue of Bookbird (2017), Victoria
Ford Smith's Between Generations: Collaborative Authorship in the Golden Age of Children's Litera-
ture (2017) and Rachel Conrad's Time for Childhoods: Young Poets and Questions of Agency (2019).
The adultist character of children's literature as limited to texts authored by adults was more recently
questioned by Lies Wesseling, who considered approaches to researching “‘another children's litera-
ture’, namely literature about, for, and by children” (2019, no page). Advocating the need to rethink
‘the asymmetry between adult authorship and juvenile readership’, Wesseling argued for paying atten-
tion to creative opportunities resulting from the development of the Internet and new media, and in
particular to the disappearing distinctions between writers and readers and the increasing number of
creative intergenerational collaborations and self-published young authors (no page). This approach
dismisses suspicions that often arise in relation to the child's creative agency in intergenerational
collaborations. As Wesseling explained, power is at stake in any joint endeavours, and although chil-
dren's creativity is inevitably ‘mediated by adult editors, translators, publishers, and public relations
and marketing professionals, this does not necessarily equal the repression or silencing of children's
voices’ (2019, no page). Therefore, as she concluded, we should explore mutual benefits coming from
creative child–adult partnerships rather than see them as always unjustly asymmetrical.
Wesseling's argument draws on Marah Gubar's kinship model of child–adult relations, an example
of the most recent childist thought in children's literature studies. In this model, ‘children and adults
are fundamentally akin to one another, even if certain differences or deficiencies routinely attend
certain parts of the aging process’ (2016, p. 299). Contesting the difference and deficit approaches
to childhood, Gubar therefore argues that children's expressions of agency or their experiences might
vary ‘in degree’ from those of adults but they should be acknowledged in relation to, rather than as
radically separate from, adults' experiences or agency (2013, p. 454). Thus, in the kinship model,
children's responses to literature and creative contributions to culture are as important and valuable
as those of adults. Gubar stresses that appreciating the kinship model necessitates a ‘perspectival
flip’ (2016, p. 300): we are so much in the habit of perceiving children and adults as separate species,
with the former being powerless and aspiring for the norm and the latter powerful and constitut-
ing the norm, that we may find child–adult connectivities hard to notice and accept. However diffi-
cult this perspectival flip may be, it has occurred, as evidenced in the growing scholarly interest
in the role of children's literature and culture in sustaining intergenerational bonds. In Adulthood
in Children's Literature (Joosen, 2018), Vanessa Joosen brings insights from age studies and chil-
dren's literature research to examine ageist motifs in depictions of old age in selected children's texts.
Importantly, she has recently extended this approach by using Wall's conceptualization of childism in
‘Connecting Childhood Studies, Age Studies and Children's Literature Studies: John Wall's Concept
of Childism and Anne Fine's The Granny Project’ (in press). Cross-age interdependencies are also
the focus of Intergenerational Solidarity in Children's Literature and Film (2021), edited by Justyna
Deszcz-Tryhubczak and Zoe Jaques, which argues for the institution of children's culture as capable of
fostering child–adult bonds, generational intelligence and empathy. This claim also drives Children's
Literature and Intergenerational Relationships: Encounters of the Playful Kind (2021b) and Rulers of
Literary Playgrounds: Politics of Intergenerational Play in Children's Literature (2021a), edited by
Justyna Deszcz-Tryhubczak and Irena Barbara Kalla. All these studies posit children's literature and
culture as a site of a spectrum of intergenerational exchanges both at the level of representation and
as a practice catalysing such experiences in real life through shared creative, receptive and research
processes.
We hope that the above review of childist developments in our field has encouraged readers to
reflect on theoretical affinities between childism in children's literature studies and childhood studies.
The most important of these convergences is the commitment to propagate the respect for intergen-
erational connectivities. Below we discuss one more such affinity—the emergence of participatory
approaches in our field as a practical attempt at unsettling the child/adult binary.
PARTICIPATORY APPROACHES IN CHILDREN'S LITERATURE

STUDIES
Wall argues that childism has implications for the humanities in that it should encourage the emer-
gence of inclusive methodologies that would not only guarantee ‘voice to expressions of otherness’
but also generate and expand possibilities for shared intergenerational understandings (2013, p. 82).
As shown above, this transformation has to some extent occurred in our field, as evidenced in the
growing interest in children's own writing as a vital and legitimate contribution to children's liter-
ature. And yet the fundamental structures of children's literature scholarship have remained adult
centred, with children typically present as subjects of reader-response inquiry rather than as compe-
tent actors and holders of knowledge and expertise concerning their lives, including their reading
experiences. Inspired directly by Wall's call for a childist revolution in the humanities through the
inclusion of children's experiences (2013), Deszcz-Tryhubczak and her colleague, Mateusz Marecki,
have argued for the use of participatory research as a way to redress the asymmetrical power rela-
tions between children's literature scholars and young readers through intergenerational dialogue and
co-production of knowledge about children's books and reading. In the years 2016–2019, in collabo-
ration with primary school students from Wrocław, Poland, and their Polish teacher, they formed an
intergenerational research team and developed two participatory projects: ‘Children's Voices in the
Polish Canon Wars’ and ‘Productive Remembering of Polish Childhoods’. Although both projects
were initiated by Deszcz-Tryhubczak and Marecki, the young researchers were invited to exercise
control over all stages of the research process. The projects resulted among others in the publication
of two peer-reviewed polyvocal articles co-written with child researchers, with each section speci-
fying the names of its authors (Chawar et al., 2018; Deszcz-Tryhubczak et al., 2019). To the best of
our knowledge, writing and publishing peer-reviewed articles with child readers remains an unprece-
dented practice in our field.
To achieve these goals, the team needed to resolve a number of ethical issues. These included the
unequal distribution of power in the research process; limitations in the representation of children's
voices; the development of child-sensitive methods, mutual trust, reciprocal respect and responsibil-
ity; the acknowledgement of intrachildhood diversity; and the situatedness, temporariness and contin-
gency of knowledge production involving young participants. The intergenerational interactions in
both projects were fluid: while the adult researchers were juggling the roles of a fraternal ‘least-adult’
figure or a facilitator (Warming, 2011, p. 39) and a supervising teacher, the child researchers ‘were
switching smoothly between their roles as supervised participants relying on adult assistance and
full-fledged primary researchers’ (Chawar et al., 2018, p. 119). As Deszcz-Tryhubczak and Marecki
found, their participatory collaboration with children required assuming the stance of ‘methodolog-
ical immaturity’ (Gallacher & Gallagher, 2008, p. 499), which entailed flexibility and openness to
children's appropriation of adult researchers' tools. As they explain: ‘It is this relationality and inter-
dependence, combined with unpredictability, that children's literature scholars may find especially
difficult not only to accept but also to recognize as potentially a productive aspect of the research
process’ (Chawar et al., 2018, p. 116). Finally, the degree of participation and decision-making
achieved in both projects varied at different stages of the collaborations. Sometimes the adults were
responsible for decision-making, initiation and direction, while there were also occasions when the
young researchers took over method selection, goal-setting and planning. Although both projects were
substantially framed by the school setting, all the participants strove to keep inevitable power inequal-
ities to a minimum by stressing child–adult interdependencies. These efforts were appreciated by the
child researchers, which is reflected in their comments in both articles.
Both projects have set a precedent for a childist transformation in children's literature studies:
they shifted scholarly attention to young readers as subjects producing knowledge that may not only
guide adult researchers in their explorations of children's books but is also valuable in its own right.
As Deszcz-Tryhubczak and Marecki conclude, without reconceiving children's literature schol-
arship as promoting intergenerational dialogue, we risk missing productive opportunities to work
with children and books for the benefit of all generations as children's literature itself ‘represents,
embodies and enables a cultural, socioeconomic and political network of bonds, interactions, alle-
giances and commitments among children and adults’ (Chawar et al., 2018, p. 112). However, as
they also realize, ‘[d]espite best efforts, participatory research with children may be questioned as
not valid and rigorous enough, according to academic (read adult) conventions’ (Deszcz-Tryhubczak
& Marecki, 2021, p. 222). Summarizing their experience gained in both projects, they propose that
although there are no universal solutions to the ethical and methodological challenges of participatory
research with children, the key to the potential of this approach to destabilize adultist assumptions in
academia lies in accepting the ‘messiness’ of participatory research as a work-in-progress rather than
as a final outcome or product.
While the above-described participatory research exemplifies childist inspirations that children's
literature scholarship has found in childhood studies, we believe that our field also has a lot to offer
to the latter. As we argue below, being focused on diverse textual forms and their circulation and
reception, children's literature studies allows for a fluid understanding of multiple temporalities, spaci-
alities and intergenerational connections that produce and shape childhood–adulthood connectivities.
CHILDISM AND FEMINIST MATERIALISMS
As Wall explains, childism appears in childhood studies ‘in analogy to concepts such as feminism,
womanism, postgenderism, postcolonialism, decolonialism, environmentalism and transhuman-
ism’ (2019, p. 1). He associates it with these ‘isms’ as related to various forms of activism rather than
to forms of discrimination they battle; that is, sexism, racism, extractivism and ageism, to name some.
Wall unsurprisingly stresses the comparison with feminism to show how childism is a positive term
linked to agency and transformation. The interdisciplinary field of childhood studies has often been
compared to that of gender studies in that the concepts of age and generation also follow Butler's post-
structuralism. Just as gender, age and generation are socially produced. Such a comparison is often
made to signal a failure of childhood studies to mainstream the generational order the way gender
studies has done with gender (Punch, 2016; Wall, 2019). This failure is reflected for example in how
funding bodies require taking into account gender relations in research projects, while nothing similar
is required for age or generational relations (Punch, 2020). Wall stresses the relation between child-
ism, gender studies and feminist scholarship, proposing the former as an activist approach to research
related to the ‘feminist ambition for systemic normative transformation’ (2019, p. 7). He admires
how gender studies took off from early women studies to a broad project of social transformation and
sketches what such a change would look like for scholarship focused on childhood: he proposes to
move the poststructuralist critique that considers childhood a socially constructed category towards
what he calls a ‘childist reconstructionism’, in which scholarship would focus not on understanding
(children's) lives, or on deconstructing hegemonic discourses that marginalize them, but on ‘recon-
structing interdependent social relations as more radically and imaginatively difference-responsive’
(2019, p. 11). Research would thus be oriented towards the creation of a difference-inclusive social
imagination in which children take part.
Childism's emphasis on bringing activism into academia shares paths with developments of
gender studies yet it would benefit from relating more deeply to contemporary feminist scholarship,
in which the call for transformation is grounded in newly developed conceptualizations of the ethical,
epistemological and ontological dimensions of research (Barad, 2007, p. 90). Barad and other femi-
nist scholars call for an attention to biosocial materialities in order to move research away from the
binary of reality/language towards complex understandings of human and more-than-human entan-
glements. New materialist philosophers pledge for a knowledge production in which ethics, ontology,
and epistemology are recognized as inseparable. This approach to research has deeply influenced
childhood studies in its movement away from an understanding of childhood as a social construction
towards conceptualizing it as a biosocial category in which age and generation are produced rather
than reflected (Diaz-Diaz & Semenec, 2020; Kraftl & Horton, 2018; Lenz Taguchi, 2011; Malone
et al., 2020; Murris, 2020; Osgood, 2014; Spyrou, 2019). If research produces childhood, it is respon-
sible for how the child and childhood are disclosed through methodological practices (Spyrou, 2018).
New materialist focus on relationalities enables moving away from the figurations of children as either
beings or becomings, which has been pivotal to debates in childhood studies for decades. The child—
just as the adult—emerges instead from human and more-than-human networks in which adult norma-
tivities are dispersed.
The appreciation of such porosities between categories sheds new light on the question of how to
distinguish nature from culture, which new materialism considers as the continuum of ‘naturecultures’
(Haraway, 2003). Scholars working with this perspective in childhood studies critique developmen-
talism as discourses and practices emerging from the relating (biological) ages to developmental
milestones and possible delays (Osgood & Robinson, 2019). Developmental psychology has been
the hegemonic paradigm in which the category of the child produces essentialist (and universalist)
assumptions. New materialism proposes instead to look at how the child and the adult are produced
in relations. Some authors call for decentring childhood (Spyrou, 2017) and moving away from
‘child-focused concerns toward more diverse issues in which children and childhood are implicated
but are clearly more wide-ranging and expansive’ (2017, p. 434). In this way they ‘dispense with the
very idea that the child—as an individuated human subject—should be the primary object of analysis
for childhood studies’ (Kraftl & Horton, 2018, p. 107).
In children's literature studies, feminist (literary) criticism has been seen as parallel to childism as
both deal with exclusion and marginalization (Hunt, 1991, p. 191–192). Lissa Paul argues that a good
reason for ‘appropriating feminist theory to children's literature’ is that ‘both women's literature and
children's literature are devalued and regarded as marginal and peripheral by the literary and educa-
tional communities’ (Paul, 1987, p. 187). She celebrates how feminist critics have been challenging
women's marginalization in literary history by giving definition and value to the literature written by
women, which took forms and explored genres outside mainstream literary cultures. In his argument
for a childist critique, Sebastian Chapleau (2007) quotes Lissa Paul, as well as Virginia Woolf's Room
of One's Own (1929), to argue about the need to value texts written by children as works of literature
produced from marginalized positions in a similar vein to that of women's writing. Interesting as this
parallelism is, it conflates the marginalization of women and that of children and risks obscuring
differences between how gender and age work. First, we need to consider the category of the margin-
alized ‘child’ with attention to the intersectional positions that produce such a child in the first place:
for instance, we should ask how it is classed, gendered, racialized, abled… Second, we need to ponder
how ageism directed against children functions differently from sexism and racism, if only because
children may potentially exit the category by growing up, while members of other oppressed groups
do not. Third, we need to look at how the category of the marginalized child entails a potential reverse:
the child will grow up and may have an ageist attitude to new generations of children. Clémentine
Beauvais (2015) speaks of the ‘mighty child’ to stress how the future potential of the child may
defy adults' hopes for preserving the current status quo. Tanu Biswas (2021) stresses how Beauvais's
notion of ‘temporal otherness’ (2018) reveals an asymmetry between children and adults in which the
former have a future (and, therefore, Time, which in modern history has been inseparably coupled
with Money), while the latter (only) have a past that they can access. How to read, thus, the power
asymmetries in these shifting relationships? How to integrate these readings into a childist literary
criticism?
Feminist literary critique is often identified with a quest to rescue and value texts written by
women and to critically analyse representations of women, but, as Rita Felski argues, it should not be
something that interests just some of us in the field but rather all of us as it alters our vision of liter-
ature as literature (2020, p. 20). Rather than revolving around the slippery category of the ‘woman’,
feminist literary critique has begun to explore a set of new questions about the relations between the
social, the political, the biological and the aesthetical. How far may this analogy between feminist and
childist scholarship take us in children's literature studies, as well as in childhood studies and knowl-
edge production at large?
Childisms should, as feminisms, seek to decentre notions of objectivity, agency and voice. As
Chapleau argues, childism is one more of those counter-hegemonic struggles—such as postcolonial-
ism, gay and lesbian movements or Marxist movements—wishing to transform the world by making
‘it an equitable place for everyone’ (2009, p. 186). But how does this struggle work when connected
to the figure of the child, which is produced in such a close relation to the promises of a better future
and world transformation? As we argue elsewhere from our position as children's literature scholars,
‘this claim for a promising future, this desire of the pedagogical project invested in young people,
makes children's literature a site of slow violence in which several exclusions keep taking place’
(García-González & Deszcz-Tryhubczak, 2021, no page). Furthermore, how is it possible to compare
the ‘feminine’ of feminist approaches and its multiple renderings in social movements to the ‘child’ of
childist approaches if such a category has been created by adults and only by academics, while most
children worldwide remain unaware of it? Who is to judge whether our perspective is childist or not?
How would various forms of child-led research be of help here?
Feminist new materialisms provide concepts that may help us navigate the complex ground in
which the struggle for childism emerges. In new materialist philosophies, identity categories are never
stable, and so the child and the adult are temporary and relational figurations produced within bioso-
ciocultural entanglements. A (childist) feminist materialist approach to children's literature may have
less to do with the child as a human body of a certain age and more with exploring the assemblages
in which such a figure is produced. What matters is the entanglements—or ‘intra-actions’, to use the
materialist term coined by Karen Barad (2007, p. 33)—of children and texts in various spaces and
times. In the following section, we describe two research projects in which we rely on feminist new
materialism to produce complex accounts of children's cultures. In a similar vein to Wall's ‘reconstruc-
tionism’, we seek to recognize and produce interdependent and affirmative relations with children;
however, our feminist materialist approach enables us to draw away from human-centred understand-
ings of agencies and to look at how the child is produced in relation to several other materialities.
In these entanglements, we focus on how the desire for a better (more equitable) future produces
childhoods.
NEW MATERIALIST CHILDIST RESEARCH IN CHILDREN'S

LITERATURE STUDIES
Deszcz-Tryhubczak attempted to embrace a relational perspective in ‘Shaping a Preferable Future:

Children Reading, Thinking and Talking about Alternatives Communities and Times’ (ChildAct),
her other participatory project co-conducted in 2018 with a group of primary school students (age
10–11) from Cambridgeshire, UK. Although Deszcz-Tryhubczak selected the children's book for the
project and invited the young researchers to read and work on it with her, she did not plan how exactly
the project would develop but waited for the children's decisions. As she recalls, ‘The moment I gave
away the copies of Un Lun Dun to the participants, I realised that anything could happen. I no longer
controlled the project as it was the children, their parents (through allowing and encouraging their
offspring to participate) and teachers […] (through taking care of the logistics) that also controlled
the flow of the research. […] I had to face the challenge of radical unpredictability, messiness and the
sheer complexity of the newly emergent relationality and interdependence’ (Deszcz-Tryhubczak, 20
19, p. 191). Importantly, the process began to be shaped not only by the human participants, but also
by ‘the nonhuman agent, Un Lun Dun [by China Miéville] itself, and its performative and creative
agency’ (2019, p. 191). The novel both prompted the initial idea for the project—as it preoccupied
Deszcz-Tryhubczak a long time before the project started—and intra-acted with the participants: on one
hand, the book inspired ideas and actions; on the other, the participants' entanglement with it activated
and spread its ‘epistemic work’ (2019, p. 191). For Deszcz-Tryhubczak, Un Lun Dun was reading the
participants' hopes and worries while they were reading and discussing it (Deszcz-Tryhubczak, 2019).
The children's team decided to examine the novel by making a film adaptation of the story, which
they intended to use to encourage a reflection on whether older and younger citizens' voices count in
government green policies.
The unpredictable development of the project made Deszcz-Tryhubczak recognize the importance
of ‘response-able’ (Barad, 2007, p. 393; Haraway, 2008, p. 88) research. She reacted to the children's
suggestions, letting herself be affected by them in various situations, including their decision that she
should play one of the character's in the film, which in a way stretched her beyond herself as an adult
researcher and reader: she needed to respond to the children's request in a caring and productive way,
thinking about how her involvement in the film would influence the research process, how her imper-
sonation of the character would correspond to the rest of the adaptation and how she would overcome
her own awkwardness when performing. The collaboration on the film meant that all the participants
‘were in a constant and mutual state of responsibility for what happened’ (Deszcz-Tryhubczak, 2019
, p. 195). Simultaneously, the research process was marked by all-pervasive joy, laughter, enthusiastic
anticipation, stress, tiredness, impatience and even frustration. Hence, it moved away from observing
and representing the workings of literature from a distance towards engaging with them via intergen-
erational collectivities and affirmative creativity.
The adaptation itself can be seen as ‘a multimodal material-discursive knowledge-production
constituted by and constituting encounters of human bodies with one another and with the non-human
world’ (Deszcz-Tryhubczak, 2019, p. 196). The latter included not only the book but also the
weather, the space of the school yard, the school library bookshelves, the filming equipment, a toy
car, costumes and face paints, the instruments stored in one of the classrooms and some sunflower
seeds. In this way ChildAct destabilized not only adult-centric critical practices but also anthropo-
centric ones as it foregrounded the fundamental relationality of all matter, or as Karen Barad puts it
in new materialist terms, a dynamism of forces (2007, p. 141) in which matter, things and bodies are
constantly exchanging and diffracting, influencing and working inseparably through their relation-
ship to other similarly contingent bodies, things and ideas, including children, adults and books. As
we argue elsewhere (García-González & Deszcz-Tryhubczak, 2020), new materialist thinking may
provide important openings for children's literature studies, enabling us to develop fresh insights into
entanglements of adults and children, both real and imaginary. It may also help us to understand how
writing, reading, drawing, film-making and other forms of doing with books may be seen as processes
of ‘becoming-with’. Maybe we can account for what a children's book does by exploring the porous-
ness between texts and readers of all ages, including the multiplicity of relationalities with textures,
spaces, feelings and other materialities? (García-González & Deszcz-Tryhubczak, 2020, p. 52).
Intergenerational connectivities and other human–non-human entanglements also constitute the
core of the collaborative platform for children's culture #EstoTbn, the hashtag meaning ‘esto también’,
‘also this’, formed in 2020 by Macarena García-González and her colleagues Soledad Véliz and Igna-
cia Saona to challenge adultist (and humanist) mainstream channels of literature recommendation for
young readers. #EstoTbn enquires into how children and adults get affected by cultural productions
and forms of recommending literary and cultural texts. The platform does so by hosting a research
project with children and school librarians from Chile, who have all been invited to share, produce and
critique recommendations of children's literature and culture in whatever format they find suitable.
The project started during the first COVID-19 wave, when recommendations of children's litera-
ture and culture proliferated in the web and related to concerns about how to deal with children during
the lockdown and growing fears about how children would cope with the harsh reality of the pandemic.
The project later moved towards exploring how certain fictional and non-fictional works for/about/by
children circulate while others are marginalized and how these processes depend on themes, genres,
styles and diverse arrangements of intergenerational collaborations that produce fictional and artistic
works. With an explicit aim to bring other media and arts to the ecosystem of reading promotion and
literary education, the project generates recommendations of books, literary fragments, videos, music
and artworks that are shared with the child and adult participants.
In #EstoTbn, the child and the adult do not hold a fixed identity and are not attached to any defin-
ing dimension such as maturity or cognitive abilities. The project strives to consider them as ‘rela-
tional ontologies’ (Spyrou, 2018, p. 25): the child and the adult do not exist prior to their encounter.
While drawing away from the category of the child, #EstoTbn nevertheless responds to a childist
desire to open spaces for children's ‘voices’. Yet voice is always ‘voice’, inevitably failing at represent-
ing subjects. Following Lisa Mazzei's (2013, 2016) critique of qualitative research that aims to repre-
sent excluded subjects by conveying their words and believing they speak for a unitary ‘I’, #EstoTbn
acknowledges how the voices produced by research methods are entangled with promises (and fail-
ures). Children send audios and write recommendations, realizing that these will be read by adults
first, while the adult participants seek to become vigilant of how their adultism also persists when
promises about children's participation are made.
Finally, in #EstoTbn, a childist (literary) criticism appears as a device for opening a multiplicity
of children's positions in relation to books and other cultural texts; agency does not reside in individ-
ual subjects or/any individual children but becomes networked, assembled, and distributed with the
participants and multiple relations with books, films, zoom meetings, emails, school libraries, social
media hashtags and human subjects. In these entanglements, the researchers try to identify the forces
of adultist ways of knowing and to examine closely what hopes are put forward by ideas of children's
voices. When the messiness of the relationalities and agencies is acknowledged, we may be able to
move more clearly away from a childism that relies on an adult promise of children's emancipation
towards one in which the complexity of multiple childhoods and child positionings comes to the fore.
CONCLUSION
If we look at how childism also emerges in relation to other concepts, we may be more prepared to use
it to address cultural production for/by children and to see how the for/by does not imply a dichotomy
but porousness. An emphasis on relationalities that draws away from the child as a fixed category
and from pretensions of rendering children's voices opens new ways of counteracting processes of
exclusion through our research methods. Yet our engagement with feminist new materialisms has also
made us aware of the benefits of repositioning child–adult connectivities into posthuman contexts,
as created and shaped by many other human and more-than-human relationalities, or simply by the
all-pervasive messiness of the world, which includes readers, texts, scholars and the materialities of
research itself. Taking into consideration the sheer multiplicity of these entanglements, we need vari-
ous kinds of childisms and their becomings rather than a fixed anthropocentric notion of childism.
Such an approach in turn necessitates methods geared not so much towards producing new knowl-
edge but immersing oneself into events and processes emerging in messy posthuman entanglements
and registering them in their singularity and fluidity without attempting to tidy them up. This is
not an easy thing to do specially in the context of increasingly output-driven and feasibility-focused
research-funding contexts. Open-ended methods face much more resistance now, but a lot may be
gained by considering tensions in and ethical commitments to a knowledge production that is able to
take risks and acknowledge the unpredictable. As our projects show, it is difficult and in fact futile to
design complex methodological approaches. We should rather be ready to respond in situ to diverse
events and connectivities through which our lives unfold to be able to have a better grasp on what
childhoods are created through our own research practices.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
We thank Professor Peter Hunt for sending us his comments on revisiting childist criticism.
DATA AVAILABILIT Y STATEMENT

The data that support the findings will be available in Repositorio UC at https://repositorio.uc.cl/
following an embargo from the date of publication to allow for commercialization of research findings.
ORCID
Justyna Deszcz-Tryhubczak https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1825-4397
Macarena García-González https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8051-9969
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AUTHOR BIOGRAPHIES
Dr. Justyna Deszcz-Tryhubczak is Associate Professor of Literature at the Institute of English

Studies, University of Wrocław, where she coordinates the Center for Young People's Literature
and Culture. She is the author of Yes to Solidarity, No to Oppression: Radical Fantasy Fiction and
Its Young Readers (2016). She has also co-edited (with Zoe Jaques) Intergenerational Solidarity
in Children's Literature and Film (2021) and (with Irena Barbara Kalla) Rulers of Literary Play-
grounds: Politics of Intergenerational Play in Children's Literature (2021) and Children's Litera-
ture and Intergenerational Relationships: Encounters of the Playful Kind (2022).
Dr. Macarena García-González is Principal Investigator at the Center for Advanced Studies in
Educational Justice of the Catholic University of Chile. She is the author of Origin Narratives.
The stories we tell children about immigration and international adoption (2017) and Enseñando
a sentir. Repertorios éticos en la ficción infantil (2021). She is a member of the executive board of
the International Research Society for Children's Literature (IRSCL).
Macarena García-González acknowledges the funding from ANID-PIA-CIE 160007 and

ANID-FONDECYT 11180070
How to cite this article: Deszcz-Tryhubczak, J., García-González, M. (2022). Thinking and
doing with childism in children's literature studies. Children & Society, 00, 1–15. https://doi.
org/10.1111/chso.12619

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Thinking and doing with childism in children's

Justyna Deszcz-Tryhubczak1 | Macarena García-González2

Child Soc. 2022;00:1–15. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/chso 1

THE CHILDIST THOUGHT IN CHILDREN'S LITERATURE

To dismiss the intended audience of a text as irrelevant seemed to me to be self-evident

(Hunt, 2021, unpublished data)

It is owing to the above-mentioned misinterpretations of the goals of childist criticism that it

PARTICIPATORY APPROACHES IN CHILDREN'S LITERATURE

CHILDISM AND FEMINIST MATERIALISMS

NEW MATERIALIST CHILDIST RESEARCH IN CHILDREN'S

Deszcz-Tryhubczak attempted to embrace a relational perspective in ‘Shaping a Preferable Future:

DATA AVAILABILIT Y STATEMENT

Dr. Justyna Deszcz-Tryhubczak is Associate Professor of Literature at the Institute of English

Macarena García-González acknowledges the funding from ANID-PIA-CIE 160007 and

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