Conversations from the Global South on Childhoods

The dominance of Northern theories in childhood studies has been documented (Abebe, Dar & Lyså, 2022; Abebe, Dar & Wells, 2024) as sustaining a largely unidirectional flow of theory. Concepts developed in the Global North like Agency, Children’s Rights, Child Labour, Participation, or Childhood Development travel southward, where they are applied, adapted, or tested. Such a framing carries significant consequences. It embeds certain analytical traditions as the default, constrains debate within pre-validated forms, and renders some dimensions of childhood visible while obscuring others. At its limit, it produces the conditions for epistemic injustice: the uneven distribution of epistemic authority, in which some knowledge-producing communities are systematically positioned as consumers rather than generators of theory (Fricker, 2007).

Yet this picture, while politically important, is itself in need of unpacking. The claim that Southern theorising rarely moves North (Connell, 2007) risks reproducing the very asymmetry it critiques, if taken as a description of what actually happens rather than a critique of what gets recognised. Scholarship on travelling concepts and the vernacularisation of theoretical frameworks — a long-standing concern in anthropology and critical theory — suggests a more unsettled account: that concepts do not travel intact, but are transformed through their uptake in different intellectual and social environments. From this perspective, the supposed predominance of Northern theory is less a straightforward reality than a claim sustained by the politics of citation, journal gatekeeping, and editorial power. Even the most canonically European thinkers — Foucault, Marx, Bourdieu — have been so thoroughly reworked through their encounters with non-European issues that the question of origin becomes analytically secondary to the question of use.

What remains, then, is not simply a problem of centre and periphery, but a problem of recognition: which transformations of theory are acknowledged as theoretical contributions, and which are absorbed invisibly into the apparatus of universal knowledge? This webinar series takes that question as its starting point.