Abstract
Scholars of childhood studies, including theologies of childhood, often cite prioritizing the well-being of children as a mark of a just society. At the same time, though, little credibility is given to children’s comprehension of their own well-being and the conditions necessary for their flourishing. What children know, especially around solidarity with the nonhuman creation, is seldom deemed legitimate in discussions of children’s well-being. Debates over the existence of climate anxiety in children together with responses that trivialize children’s climate activism provide clear examples of the disregard for their knowledge. I engage the work of Miranda Fricker on epistemic injustice as a resource for theological critique of the delegitimization of children’s embodied knowledge of planetary solidarity as crucial to their well-being.
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Notes
For important exceptions, see Currie and Deschênes (2016) and Hickman (2019, 2020, 2022, 2024). Hickman (2019) provides a reflexive account of her interview methodology with children that takes especially seriously the value of children’s emotions and ways of knowing about climate change. An important early example of positive attention to children’s climate knowledge is Strife’s (2012) empirical study in which she interviewed children and solicited their drawings about futures.
Spivak (1988) describes strategic essentialism as a “strategic use of positivist essentialism in a scrupulously visible political interest... to retrieve the subaltern consciousness” (p. 205).
Developmental theories underlie a number of influential 20th-century educational and social reform movements intended to aid children and contribute to their well-being. These include movements such as child-centered learning (Montessori, 1964) and the child study and child welfare movements (Gesell, 1925; Hall, 1893; see also Takanishi, 1978). There also are multiple influential critiques of developmental theory, for which Burman (2016), Walkerdine (1993), and Woodhead (2009) provide helpful overviews.
Piaget (1929/1973) applied the label of “primitive thought” to animism, tying it to young children and others he treated as less than fully competent. See Merewether’s (2023, pp. 25–26) critical description of Piagetian developmental psychology on the basis of its rendering of animism as an “underdeveloped” state.
Here, I use the term imaginary not in the sense cited above in the discussion of Charles Taylor’s social imaginary but rather as a reference to a human’s creative capacities for meaning making through the form of knowing called imagination. Imagination makes use of both cognitive and affective capacities and, as Tateo (2020) argues, is therefore a form of higher knowledge.
Robin Kimmerer (2013) speaks to this point in her story about the wisdom of pecan groves:
In the old times, our elders say, the trees talked to each other. They’d stand in their own council and craft a plan. But scientists decided long ago that plants were deaf and mute, locked in isolation without communication. The possibility of conversation was summarily dismissed. Science pretends to be purely rational, completely neutral, a system of knowledge-making in which the observation is independent of the observer. And yet the conclusion was drawn that plants cannot communicate because they lack the mechanisms that animals use to speak.... There is now compelling evidence that our elders were right—the trees are talking to one another. (pp. 19–20).
Pointing out a similar disenfranchisement of Indigenous people’s knowledge, anthropologist Eduardo Batalha Viveiros de Castro (2019) writes about the “perspectival multinaturalism” of Amerindian myths in which humans and other animals are indistinct: “For Amazonian peoples, the original common condition of both humans and animals is not animality but, rather, humanity.... Animals are ex-humans (rather than humans, ex-animals)” (p. 465).
For a more complete treatment of the dismissing of children’s ecological grief, see, e.g., Shierry Weber Nicholsen’s 2002 book The Love of Nature and the End of the World: The Unspoken Dimensions of Environmental Concern. See also Russell (2017) for a fascinating account of interview research with children on their experiences with the death of nonhuman animals. Russell argues for a developmental framework that includes children’s relationships with animals, with “an ecological view of children’s experiences with animals and the role that death plays in these shared communities.” He continues, “In this way, I believe my work seeks to fulfill the goals of giving children a voice in larger discourses about human–animal and human–nature relationships and what they ought to be or how they might evolve while simultaneously emphasizing the goal of taking animal perspectives seriously in our very multi-species communities” (p. 88).
In the 2019 school strike for climate change action led by Thunberg, the former Australian prime minister Tony Abbott reportedly told a group of students that “the earth has survived many things” and that he disbelieved scientists’ predictions of “environmental catastrophe.” A woman in the crowd reportedly shouted that the protesters should “go back to school!” (Chung & Noyes, 2019; see also Bergmann & Ossewaarde, 2020).
For young people’s own voices related to this, see Diffey et al. (2022).
Sally Weintrobe explores this phenomenon through a psychoanalytic lens, naming it as a form of “disavowal” (Weintrobe, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2024). She locates the effects of such disavowed knowledge in moral injury, asserting that “neoliberal culture recruits people to participate in an immoral project, which is to live daily life in a way that collectively causes huge environmental and social damage and is unsustainable. It is a culture that actively ‘uncares’ people, by encouraging them to damp down their awareness that even ordinary shopping now faces people with moral dilemmas” (2020, p. 352).
An interesting example of researchers giving themselves over to alternative ways of relating to the nonhuman world may be found in Willis Jenkins’s (2021) report on the Coastal Futures Conservatory project, a multidisciplinary project in which scholars of environmental humanities and sciences worked together using contemplative attention through listening to learn about the Virginia coastal ecology amid rapid environmental change. The researchers introduced contemplative listening practices into the research design with the assumption that something new could be known about the coastal ecology by listening rather than via the dominant research approaches alone.
Phronesis, from Aristotle, is often translated as “prudence,” or practical wisdom tied to wise action.
For example, Nairn (2019) echoes LaMothe’s model of care with its twin attention to individual suffering and to mobilizing communities to work for change at the meta-level of the causes of suffering. Youth in her study identified participation in collective action as key for generating hope. Trott (2021, p. 300) considers the “transformative potential of everyday activism, especially by children and youth,” as a means of caring for young people affected by climate anxiety. Ojala’s (2012a, 2012b, 2016) research highlights “meaning making” strategies for coping with climate change that include promoting hope through environmental activism. These researchers along with many others affirm the insufficiency of simply attending to an individual child’s climate anxiety as a mental health concern without also empowering agency and hope through activism aimed at structures and systems.
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Mercer, J.A. What Children Know: Children, Climate Change, and Epistemic Injustice. Pastoral Psychol (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11089-024-01146-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11089-024-01146-7