John Wall
Distinguished Professor of Philosophy, Religion, and Childhood Studies, Rutgers University
Founder and Co-Director of the Childism Institute
Co-Founder and Co-Director of the Children's Voting Colloquium
Monographs and Edited Volumes
The Bloomsbury Handbook of Theories in Childhood Studies
Sarada Balagopalan, John Wall, and Karen Wells, editors, Bloomsbury Publishers, 2024
The Bloomsbury Handbook of Theories in Childhood Studies brings together an international group of childhood studies scholars who work with a range of critical theories. It speaks to both scholars and students by addressing questions such as how childhoods are diversely constructed and how children's experiences can be better understood. The volume draws together a diversity of theoretical perspectives from the social sciences and humanities such as critical race studies, disability studies, posthumanism, feminism, politics, decolonialism, queer theory and postcolonialism to generate a much-needed conversation about how to move childhood studies forward as a grounded field of research. This handbook will be an essential text not just for childhood studies researchers, but for all those interested in theorizing what childhood is, what work it does and who children are.
Contents:
1. Introduction, Sarada Balagopalan (Rutgers University, USA), John Wall (Rutgers University, USA), and Karen Wells (Birkbeck, University of London, UK)
Part I: Subjectivities: 2. Mission Impossible: Investing Children with Literary Authorities, Anna Mae Duane (University of Connecticut, USA) 3. Democracy and Developmentalism: The Logics of Child Exclusion, Toby Rollo (Lakehead University, Canada) 4. Why Theorize 'Difference'?: Postcolonialism and Childhood Studies, Sarada Balagopalan (Rutgers University, USA) 5. Thinking with Ontology in Childhood Studies, Spyros Spyrou (European University Cyprus, Cyprus) 6. Childhoods, Materialities, and Spatialities: Theorising 'Beyond' the Subject, Peter Kraftl (University of Birmingham, UK) 7. Inviting Disability: Disabled Children and Studies of Childhood, Katherine Runswick-Cole, Dan Goodley and Kirsty Liddiard (University of Sheffield, UK) 8. Queer Theory and Childhood Studies, Utsa Mukerjee (University of Southampton, UK) 9. Locating Children's Moral Subjectivities and 'Voice' in Research with Children and Young People, Ilina Singh (University of Oxford, UK)
Part II: Relationalities: 10. Children, Childhoods and Decolonial Theory, Lucia Rabello de Castro (Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil) 11. Drawing Back from Children's Agency: Assemblage as Ontology, Description and Relationality, David Oswell (Goldsmiths, University of London, UK) 12. Toward a Black Feminism for Black Girls, Aria S. Halliday (University of Kentucky, USA) 13. Living Rights Theory, Olga Nieuwenhuys and Karl Hanson (University of Geneva, Switzerland) 14. Protagonismo and Power: Building Political Theory with Young Activists, Jessica Taft (University of California, Santa Cruz, USA) 15. Childhood Prism Research, Hanne Warming (Roskilde University, Denmark) 16. Childism: Transforming Critical Theory in Response to Children, John Wall (Rutgers University, USA) 17. Queer Aesthetics and Childhood Stories, Hannah Dyer (Brock University, Canada)
Part III: Structures: 18. Children and Power Relations: The Contribution of Governmentality Theory to Childhood Studies, Karen Smith (University College Dublin, Ireland) 19. Critical Realism and Theories of Babies' Rights, Priscilla Alderson (University College London, UK) 20. Theorizing Racialisation, Epistemic Violence and Children's Intersectional Positioning, Ann Phoenix (University College London, UK) 21. Childhood in and Through Social Reproduction Theory, Rachel Rosen (University College London, UK) 22. Coloniality and the Geographies of Children and Youth in Rural Northern Turtle Island and Beyond, Onyx Sloan Morgan, Christine Añonuevo, Richel Donaldson, Marion Erickson, Kimberley Thomas, Margo Greenwood, and Sarah de Leeuw (University of Northern British Colombia, Canada) 23. Theorizing 'Surplus Populations' in Racial Capitalism Through Juvenile Justice, Karen Wells (Birkbeck, University of London, UK) 24. Growing Up Jim Crow: Child Science, Racial Segregation, and Black Children's Ways of Knowing, Paula Austin (Boston University, USA) 25. Theorizing Child Migration: Experiences, Governance, Normativity, Jonathan Josefsson (Linköping University, Sweden) 26. Critical Childhood Studies Meets Critical Legal Scholarship, Hedi Viterbo (Queen Mary University London, UK)
Reviews
“A wonderful new resource for researchers and students interested in leading edge concepts in childhood studies.” John Horton, University of Northampton, UK
Give Children the Vote: On Democratizing Democracy
John Wall, Bloomsbury Publishers, 2022
Throughout history, the right to vote has been extended to landowning men, the poor, minorities, women, and young adults. In each case, the meaning of democracy itself has been transformed. The one major group still denied suffrage is the third of humanity who are under 18 years of age. However, children are becoming increasingly active in political movements for climate regulation, labor rights, gun control, transexual identity, and racial justice. And these have led to a growing global movement to eliminate minimum ages of enfranchisement.
This book argues that it is time to give children the vote. Using political theory and drawing on childhood studies, it shows why suffrage cannot legitimately be limited according to age, as well as why truly universal voting is beneficial to all and can help save today’s crumbling democratic norms. It carefully responds to a wide range of objections concerning competence, knowledge, adult rights, power relations, harms to children, and much more. And it develops a detailed childist theory of voting based on holding elected representatives maximally responsive to the people’s different lived experiences. The book also introduces the concept of proxy-claim voting, wherein parents or guardians exercise proxy votes for non-competent persons, both child and adult, until whatever time those persons wish to claim or reclaim the exercise of their vote for themselves. Ultimately, the book maps out a new vision of democratic voting that, by equally empowering children, is at last genuinely democratic.
Contents:
Introduction 1. Voting over History 2. Competence 3. Knowledge 4. Power 5. Outcomes for Children 6. Outcomes for Societies 7. The Proxy-Claim Vote Manifesto
Reviews
“Future generations will ponder why children were for so long denied the right to have their views represented at the ballot box, just as we wonder why societies argued against the right of women and people of colour to vote. Professor John Wall has written a scholarly work that is also a gripping read.” ― Neena Modi, Professor of Neonatal Medicine, Imperial College London, UK
“Is it time to give children the vote? In a nuanced, deeply thought and challenging way, this book combines political theory and childhood studies and demonstrates why the constraining of suffrage rights according to age can be profoundly problematic. It undercuts simplistic comprehensions about adult voting rights, competence, knowledge and how age structure power relations. John Wall extends the argument to a claim for proxy voting for all children. It contains both a vision of how proxy voting can help to redeem deteriorating democratic values and an insightful and novel social critique. This book will stimulate new thinking in a wide range of areas and deserves a broad audience among academic scholars, politicians, activists for extension of voting rights – simply anyone interested in the future of our democracies.” ― Bengt Sandin, Professor Emeritus of Child Studies, Linköping University, Sweden
“John Wall’s book makes strong arguments for why children should be granted universal suffrage without setting a minimum age. … [T]he book is written in a way that makes it easy for the reader to weigh the different proposals for children’s suffrage and make their own judgement. It is also a creative contribution to counteract the adultism that is still prevalent in today’s societies.” ― Manfred Liebel, Independent Researcher, Germany, and Philip Meade, Potsdam University of Applied Sciences, Germany
Exploring Children's Suffrage: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Ageless Voting
John Wall, editor, Palgrave Macmillan, 2022
This edited volume offers a critical, thorough, and interdisciplinary examination of arguments for eliminating the minimum democratic voting age. As children and youth increasingly assert their political voices on issues such as climate change, gun legislation, Black Lives Matter, and education reform, calls for youth enfranchisement merit further academic conversation. Leading scholars in childhood studies, political science, philosophy, history, law, medicine, and economics come together in this collection to explore the diverse assumptions behind excluding children from voting rights and why these are open to question. While arriving at different and sometimes competing conclusions, each chapter deconstructs the idea of voting as necessarily tied to age while reconstructing a more democratic imagination able to enfranchise the third of humanity made up by children and youth. Thus, this book defines and establishes a new field of academic study and public debate around children's suffrage.
Contents:
1. Introduction: Children’s Suffrage Studies, John Wall.
PART I: Theoretical Frameworks.
2. Silence is Poison: Explaining and Curing Adult “Apathy,” Michael Cummings.
3. How Low Can You Go? The Capacity to Vote among Young Citizens, Nick Munn.
4. The Case for Children’s Voting, John Wall.
PART II: Historical Contexts
5. The Enfranchisement of Women vs the Enfranchisement of Children, David Runciman.
6. De-Colonizing Children’s Suffrage: Engagements with Dr B R Ambedkar’s Ideas on Democracy, Anandini Dar.
7. The Reform that Never Happened: A History of Children’s Suffrage Restrictions, Jonathan Josefsson and Bengt Sandin.
PART III: Practical Considerations.
8. Generational economics, Luigi Campiglio and Lorenza Alexandra Lorenzetti.
9. Legality of Age Restrictions on Voting: A Canadian Perspective, Cheryl Milne.
10. A View from Paediatric Medicine: Competence, Best Interests, and Operational Pragmatism, Neena Modi.
Children's Rights: Today's Global Challenge
John Wall, Rowman & Littlefield, 2016
This accessible and authoritative book provides the first systematic overview of the global children’s rights movement. It introduces both beginners and experts to child and youth rights in all their theoretical, historical, cultural, political, and practical complexity. In the process, the book examines key controversies about globalization, cultural relativism, social justice, power, economics, politics, freedom, ageism, and more. Combining vivid examples with cutting-edge scholarship, Children’s Rights: Today’s Global Challenge lifts up the rights of the youngest third of humanity as the major human rights challenge of the twenty-first century.
Contents: 1. Why Children’s Rights 2. Theoretical Controversies 3. Historical Ambiguities 4. Education in an Age of Globalization 5. The New Child Slavery 6. The Right to Vote 7. Today’s Global Challenge
Reviews
“John Wall is right when stating that this is the century of children’s rights. His book guides us through the many challenges we need to take up to ensure that human rights can be understood and practiced in creative new ways that are fully inclusive of children. This is a must read for academics, students, and professionals as it inspires and motivates by bringing together theoretical, historical, and practical debates. — Bruno Vanobbergen, University of Ghent, Children’s Rights Commissioner for the European Network of Ombudspersons for Children (ENOC)
"Ethicist and philosopher John Wall tackles some of the most intriguing and important questions posed by the concept of rights for children. In addition to articulating a persuasive and coherent theory of children’s rights that builds on the experiences of prior emerging rights movements, Professor Wall explores how children’s rights play out in specific contexts from the right to vote to the right to be free from exploitative labor. Free of jargon and a pleasure to read, this is a book for every reader who cares about the future of human rights." — Barbara Bennett Woodhouse, LQC Lamar Professor of Law, Emory University
John Wall builds on his work on morality and ethics to refresh our views on children’s rights. He moves the reader away from a minority world perspective to explore the ways children’s rights are interpreted and reinterpreted in specific contexts across the world. His blend of history, philosophy, and sociology presents an up-to-date analysis of ongoing debates around cultural relativism, education, child labor, and exploitation. He presents a new argument on aspirations to children’s voting rights. This is a useful book for anyone who is interested in the plight of children globally. — Tom Cockburn, Edge Hill University
Wall skillfully takes the contested subject area of children’s rights and makes it accessible to a wide range of readers without reducing the quality or complexity of the debates presented. … This text is essential to have on the library shelves of any institution which explores childhood rights discourses and legislation and is already identified as essential reading for my own students. It eloquently outlines the emergence of rights as well as its ambiguities and current challenges. Without sentimentality, Wall articulates the plight of children globally and calls for the transformation of children’s rights to be the catalyst to reshape human rights for both adult and child. — Sarah Richards, University of Suffolk
Children and Armed Conflict: Cross-Disciplinary Investigations
Daniel Thomas Cook and John Wall, editors, Palgrave Macmillan, 2011
Violence, conflict, and war challenge everyday understandings about the ‘nature’ of children and boundaries of childhood. In the disruption and destruction of the lives of children, their families and communities, childhood itself transforms and takes shape. Children, like others, are both subject to the consequences of war and actively involved in many aspects of conflict. They are and have been fighters, victims, refugees, peace-builders and reasons both to enter into and to end wars. Children and Armed Conflict explores the multi-faceted ways in which children have encountered armed conflict, illuminating their varied historical and contemporary roles. This book moves beyond conceptualizing the child simply as either ‘victim’ or ‘soldier’ by examining children’s experiences of armed conflict in their broader historical, sociological, anthropological, literary, cultural, psychological, and public policy complexities.
Contents: Introduction: Broadening the Conversation, Daniel Thomas Cook and John Wall.
Part I. Contextualizing Children’s Armed Conflict Historically. 1. Girl Soldiers in World War I: Marina Yulova and Sofja Nowosieska, Margaret R. Higonnet. 2. “What good are the words?”: Child Memoirs and Holocaust Fiction, Adrienne Kertzer 3. Playing at War: Modern Historical Trends and Debates, Gary Cross.
Part II. Understanding Children’s Armed Conflict Experiences. 4. Personal and Collective Psychosocial Resilience: Implications for Children, Young People and Their Families Involved in War and Disasters, Richard Williams and John Drury. 5. Psychological Impact of War Atrocities in Darfur on Children: Implications for Assessment and Intervention in War Zone Areas, Dorothy Morgos. 6. Community Politics in Refugee Contexts: Young People, Networks and Decision-Making, Christina Clark-Kazak. 7. Children as Victims of War: The Moral Economy of Care, Charles Watters.
Part III. Rethinking Children’s Armed Conflict Policy. 8 . “Playing ‘Catch with a Hatchet’”: Integrating Children’s Knowledge into Post-War Peacebuilding, Siobhan McEvoy-Levy. 9. Protection of Children in Disaster and War, Layal T. E. Sarrouh and Neil Boothby. 10. Child Soldiers: Protection or Responsibility, Joseph Rikhof. 11. The Reintegration of Formerly Recruited Girls: A Resilience Approach, Michael Wessells.
Conclusion: Insights for Further Research, John Wall and Daniel Thomas Cook.
Reviews
“This book is indispensible for anyone interested in the problem of children in war. It is a strikingly fresh collection of essays that brings a strong empirical and multidisciplinary approach to an issue dominated by ideology and rhetoric. Drawing on contemporary and historical examples from North America, Northern Ireland, Russia, France, Darfur, Sierra Leone and elsewhere the essays portray the lives of children in complex situations of armed conflict where they emerge as fully human heroes, soldiers, victims, agents, sufferers, patriots and perpetrators. The book is a splendid contribution to the study of children and childhood.” - Professor David Rosen, Fairleigh Dickson University, USA
John Wall, Georgetown University Press, 2010
Childhood faces humanity with its own deepest and most perplexing questions. An ethics that truly includes the world’s childhoods would transcend pre-modern traditional communities and modern rational autonomy with a postmodern aim of growing responsibility. It would understand human relations in a poetic rather than universalistic sense as openly and interdependently creative. As a consequence, it would produce new understandings of moral being, time, and otherness, as well as of religion, rights, narrative, families, obligation, and power.
Ethics in Light of Childhood fundamentally reimagines ethical thought and practice in light of the experiences of the third of humanity who are children. Much like humanism, feminism, womanism, and environmentalism, Wall argues, a new childism is required that transforms moral thinking, relations, and societies in fundamental ways. Wall explores childhood’s varied impacts on ethical thinking throughout history, advances the emerging interdisciplinary field of childhood studies, and reexamines basic assumptions in contemporary moral theory and practice. In the process, he does not just apply ethics to childhood but applies childhood to ethics—in order to imagine a more expansive humanity.
Contents: Introduction. PART I. HISTORY 1. Three Enduring Models. PART II. THEORY 2. What Is Human Being? 3. What Is the Human Aim? 4. What Is Owed Each Other? PART III. PRACTICE 5. Human Rights in Light of Childhood. 6. The Generative Family. 7. The Art of Ethical Thinking. Conclusion.
Reviews
“Could viewing moral issues from the perspective of children create a revolution in philosophical and religious ethics? This beautifully written book brilliantly argues that it will. Get ready for a new paradigm in ethics that author John Wall calls ‘childism.’ It may be as exciting for ethics as feminism was thirty years ago and be central to moral debates for decades to come.” — Don Browning, professor emeritus, The University of Chicago
“This is not just a book about children and ethics. This book revolutionizes the very way ethics is done. With probing insight and close attention to social practice, John Wall rescues children from their usual place as the ‘most systematically excluded group on the planet’ and moves them to the center of moral deliberation. This book should be required reading for ethicists and all those who care about sustaining the good life and a just society.” — Bonnie J. Miller-McLemore, E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Professor of Pastoral Theology, Vanderbilt University
“This wonderful book takes the study of childhood and of ethics to a new and transformative level. Animating ethical theory with stories drawn from real children’s lives, Wall calls for a fundamental restructuring of ethical thinking. It is essential reading for anyone who thinks deeply about children.” — Barbara Woodhouse, L. Q. C. Lamar Chair in Law and co-director, Barton Child Law and Policy Clinic, Emory University
“Creative, thought-provoking book.” — Choice
“The author takes us on a stimulating journey through considerations of history, theory and practice, and frequently relies on the perceptions of children themselves to illustrate the points he wants to make.” — Fraser Brown, Children & Society
Moral Creativity: Paul Ricoeur and the Poetics of Possibility
John Wall, Oxford University Press, 2005
In Moral Creativity, John Wall argues that moral life and thought are inherently and radically creative. Human beings are called by their own primordially created depths to exceed historical evil and tragedy through the ongoing creative transformation of their world. This thesis challenges ancient Greek and biblical separations of ethics and poetic image-making, as well as contemporary conceptions of moral life as grounded in abstract principles or preconstituted traditions. Taking as his point of departure the poetics of the will of Paul Ricoeur, and ranging widely into critical conversations with Continental, narrative, feminist, and liberationist ethics, Wall uncovers the profound senses in which moral practice and thought involve tension, catharsis, excess, and renewal.
Contents: Introduction. The Possibility for Moral Creativity. 1. Paul Ricoeur and the Poetic Moral Self. 2. Radical Evil and the Narration of Goods. 3. Otherness and the Poetics of Love. 4. Ideology and the Art of Reconciliation. Conclusion: The Poetics of Moral Life.
Reviews
“John Wall is dealing here with one of the most urgent philosophical questions of our time. He manages to combine a lively, anecdotal, engaging syle with a lucid sense of argument and a wide range of scholarly reference. Ricoeur is his guiding spirit but by no means an exclusive one. This is much more then a critical monograph or missionary declaration of intent. It is a deeply reflective, personally engaged, intellectually robust journey into the very meaning of ‘creativity’ in its cultural, ontological, aesthetic and ethical dimensions.” — Richard Kearney, The Charles Seelig Professor of Philosophy, Boston College
“John Wall’s Moral Creativity is a thoughtfully written, carefully researched, and insightful book that makes an original contribution to religious ethics through a critical reading of the work of Paul Ricoeur. Wall successfully crafts a poetic moral philosophy in relation to the narratological and tragic dimensions of human existence. Through careful and sensitive readings of important Continental and postmodern thinkers, Wall calls the reader to create a narrative unity of life amidst the complexities and incommensurabilities of daily, lived existence. A stunning achievement and must read for students and scholars interested in the moral life in the face of radical evil and the loss of hope in our time.” — Mark I. Wallace, Professor, Swarthmore College
“Wall has skillfully woven the exegetical, dialogical, and constructive parts of his project into a thought-provoking and readable work. Moral Creativity could be profitably read by anyone familiar with contemporary debates in religious and philosophical ethics. It will both broaden the appeal of Ricoeur’s writings and advance the conversation about the relation of ethics to poetics.” — Glenn Whitehouse, Florida Gulf Coast University
Paul Ricoeur and Contemoprary Moral Thought
John Wall, William Schweiker, and David Hall, eds. Routledge, 2002 and 2016
The purpose of this book is to explore and propose new avenues for contemporary moral thought. The wide array of scholars who have contributed their voices to this work are bound together by common concerns and a sense of the moral possibilities and demands confronting us. At the center of this inquiry stands a figure. Uniting the essayists is the attempt to define and assess for ethics the significance of the writings of French philosopher Paul Ricoeur. While individual contributions often reach beyond Ricoeur’s work and sometimes are at odds with his thought, the authors are one with him in a spirit of exploration about what matters most to persons and how best to sustain just communities.
Contents:
Preface. Introduction: Human Capability and Contemporary Moral Thought /John Wall, William Schweiker, and W. David Hall
Part I: Moral Selfhood, the Good, and the Right. 1. RICOEUR’S RECLAMATION OF AUTONOMY: UNITY, PLURALITY, AND TOTALITY /Pamela Sue Anderson 2. NARRATIVE ETHICS AND MORAL LAW IN RICOEUR /Peter Kemp 3. MORAL MEANING: BEYOND THE GOOD AND THE RIGHT /John Wall 4. ANTIGONE, PSYCHE, AND THE ETHICS OF FEMALE SELFHOOD: A FEMINIST CONVERSATION WITH PAUL RICOEUR’S THEORIES OF SELF-MAKING IN ONESELF AS ANOTHER /Helen M. Buss 5. THE SUMMONED SELF: ETHICS AND HERMENEUTICS IN PAUL RICOEUR IN DIALOGUE WITH EMMANUEL LEVINAS /Mark I. Wallace
Part II: Moral Meanings, Human Fallibility, and Theological Ethics. 6. SEARCHING FOR A HEART OF GOLD: A RICOEURIAN MEDITATION ON MORAL STRIVING AND THE POWER OF RELIGIOUS DISCOURSE /David E. Klemm 7. STARRY HEAVENS AND MORAL WORTH: HOPE AND RESPONSIBILITY IN THE STRUCTURE OF THEOLOGICAL ETHICS /William Schweiker 8. THE SITE OF CHRISTIAN ETHICS: LOVE AND JUSTICE IN THE WORK OF PAUL RICOEUR /W. David Hall 9. VEILS AND KINGDOMS: A RICOEURIAN METAPHORICS OF LOVE AND JUSTICE /Glenn Whitehouse 10. JACQUES DERRIDA, PAUL RICOEUR, AND THE MARGINALIZATION OF CHRISTIANITY: CAN THE GOD OF PRESENCE BE SAVED? /Linda M. MacCammon
Part III: Moral Practice, Responsible Citizenship, and Social Justice. 11. ETHICS AND PUBLIC LIFE: A CRITICAL TRIBUTE TO PAUL RICOEUR /Fred Dallmayr 12. RICOEUR AND THE TASKS OF CITIZENSHIP /Bernard P. Dauenhauer 13. RICOEUR AND PRACTICAL THEOLOGY /Don Browning 14. RICOEUR ON TRAGEDY: TELEOLOGY, DEONTOLOGY, AND PHRONESIS /Martha C. Nussbaum
Conclusion: 15. ETHICS AND HUMAN CAPABILITY: A RESPONSE /Paul Ricoeur
Reviews
“[A]n impressive edition that contributes not only to our understanding of Ricoeur’s work but also to contemporary debates in normative philosophy.” – Journal of the American Academy of Religion
“The Wall, Schweiker and Hall volume springs from a conference on Ricoeur’s ethics held at the University of Chicago. As it is a conference at which Ricoeur was in attendance, there is a much more respectful tone toward Ricoeur’s work, but as with Ricoeur’s decade in Cérisy, there is little fawning, but rather an atmosphere of collegial freedom amongst the participants to appropriate Ricoeur’s insights into their own projects. It is a credit to Ricoeur and his work that he engenders so many conversation partners but so few disciples.” – Boyd Blundell, Boston College, Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory
Marriage, Health and the Professions
John Wall, Don Browning, William J. Doherty, and Stepher Post, eds., Eerdmans, 2002
The purpose of this book is to investigate how the professions should approach marriage in today’s world of high divorce, cohabitation, and nonmarital births. Specifically, the book is a response to and analysis of recent social scientific evidence that marriage is on the whole good for the partners involved, their children, and society.
