Using Adultism in Conceptualizing Oppression of Children and Youth: More Than a Buzzword?

Within the field of Childhood Studies and the broader field of Social Justice scholarship and activism it is increasingly recognized that child-adult relations represent a distinct axis of oppression. This has been associated with an upsurge in use of the term adultism as a tool to conceptualize and challenge oppressive child-adult relations. It remains the case that in wider academic, political, and public discourse the question of whether children and youth represent an oppressed group is still regarded with some skepticism, and the term adultism is not commonly used or understood. This paper examines whether adultism is a useful lens for conceptualizing and interrogating oppression of children and youth or merely the buzzword du jour. The paper focuses on the intellectual underpinnings of adultism, drawing on conceptual scholarship on oppression, intersectionality, and power relations from the fields of Social Justice, Equality Studies, Governmentality Studies, and Childhood Studies to inform reflection on how the concept has been defined and used. It is argued that there is scope for greater clarity and consistency in how adultism is used and a need to ground the concept more firmly in the relevant theoretical and conceptual literature if it is to be more than a buzzword. The paper contributes to theorization of adultism by taking exploitation as a starting point for examining oppression of children and young people, arguing that the instrumentalization of childhood as a technology of subjectification facilitates regulation and exploitation not just of children and young people, but of human adults and non-human entities in ways which are always and inevitably bound up with the multiplicity of interlocking oppressive relations