Social Transformation from below: Childhood, Children and the Quest for Justice

This contribution discusses how childhood, albeit a divisive positionality with regards to prerogatives of social power and public social decision, stands as a relevant vantage point to foreground a critique of the present adult-centred society and forward insights of social transformation. Children, though consisting of up to a third of the world population, have been recurrently disregarded as a social category concerning their claims of material well-being, educational demands, and above all, political participation in public life. As a dominated social group, children’s voices do not resonate and affect to enlarge adults’ understandings about collective life rather they are often taken as babbles, grumbles or noises. However, in their own terms, children have shown the diversity of social harms they suffer pointing at fairer and more equal social relationships and social conviviality. Relying on a decolonial inspiration, the particularities of generational domination, intersected by so many others, are unravelled, as children’s movements of ‘slow’ opposition, resistance and insurgence point at needed social changes as seen from below. The empirical examples drawn here from childhoods of the Global South offer an instigating entry point to analyse how the quest for justice and equality by children is interweaved in the politics of intergenerational relationships.