CCYSC Awaaz

This episode features a conversation with Clara Han and Andrew Brandel. They discuss Dr Han's recent book, Seeing Like a Child: Inheriting the Korean War (Fordham University Press, 2020), which explores the violence of the Korean War through the perspective of a child. In this book, Clara Han writes from inside her childhood memories as the daughter of parents who were displaced by war, and simultaneously, as an anthropologist whose fieldwork has taken her to the devastated worlds of her parents— Korea and the Korean language. Seeing Like a Child sees the inheritance of familial memories of violence as embedded in how the child inhabits her everyday life and invites us to explore categories such as “catastrophe”, “war”, “violence”, and “kinship” in a brand-new light.

This episode discusses the recently published book, Children and Youth as Subjects, Objects, Agents: Innovative Approaches to Research Across Space and Time, co-edited by Deborah Levison, Mary Jo Maynes, and Frances Vavrus. This volume features a wide range of essays that showcase a variety of approaches to the interdisciplinary field of childhood and youth studies, examining how young people in a range of contemporary and historical contexts around the globe live their young lives as subjects, objects, and agents.

In this episode Peter Wien hosts Dylan Baun for a discussion of 20th century youth politics in the Middle East based on Baun's recent book Winning Lebanon: Youth Politics, Populism, and the Production of Sectarian Violence, 1920-1958 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021). The conversation covers Lebanese youth organizations from their inception in the period of French Mandate rule between the two World Wars to the first Lebanese civil war of 1958. Despite the similarities between the youth movements in terms of rituals, appearances, and comportment, they played an essential role in the drawing of sectarian boundaries foreshadowing decades of violent conflict.

In the second episode of the series with Basia Vucic about education and childhood, Yamila Rodríguez and Seran Demiral revisit child-centered approaches within a critical perspective by pointing out Janusz Korczak's experience with Polish children in between two wars through an experiment of building a democratic community. Basia both reveals the differences underlying between Korczak pedagogy and social psychologists, like Jean Piaget and Lev Vygotsky, and explained a unique concept Praeternatural Pedagogy to underline children being as little scientists, thinkers, and human subjects as well. 

Basia Vucic is an expert on the philosophy of education -and especially on JK educational philosophy- from UCL, London (UK). Invited as a 2019 visiting fellow to the UNESCO Janusz Korczak Chair at the Maria Grzegorzewska University in Warsaw, the scope of her research at UCL includes the hidden history of the child rights movement, political theory, and democratic education

Yamila Rodríguez, Lawyer & Ph.D. Scholar, Department of Law, University of Buenos Aires, researches the extension of the international obligation of the state to ensure children's rights to participation and access to justice in the criminal justice system, focusing on children who are victims and witnesses of crimes with her academic training and career as a civil servant at a Criminal Court in Buenos Aires, where she worked for over ten years.

Seran Demiral, Ph.D. in Sociology at Mimar Sinan University, has studied the subjectivity of children through their interaction with digital technologies. She is interested in changing childhood experiences within online environments and teaches digital childhoods, children's literature, creative writing, and sociology at various universities as a part-time lecturer. 

Edited by Nipunika Sachdeva

Music:  Little Idea by Scott Holmes (scottholmesmusic.com) / CC BY-NC

In the first episode of this series, Yamila Rodríguez and Seran Demiral speak with Basia Vucic, who is an expert on the philosophy of education -and especially on JK educational philosophy- from UCL, London (UK) about the good or evil nature of the child in the history of childhood and its relation with criminological theories and educational approaches.

Yamila Rodríguez, Lawyer & PhD Scholar, Department of Law, University of Buenos Aires, researches the extension of the international obligation of the state to ensure children's rights to participation and access to justice in the criminal justice system, focusing on children who are victims and witnesses of crimes with her academic training and career as a civil servant at a Criminal Court in Buenos Aires, where she worked for over ten years. 

Seran Demiral, PhD in Sociology at Mimar Sinan University, has studied the subjectivity of children through their interaction with digital technologies. She is interested in changing childhood experiences within online environments and teaches digital childhoods, children's literature, creative writing and sociology at various universities as a part-time lecturer.

Edited by Nipunika Sachdeva

Music:  Little Idea by Scott Holmes (scottholmesmusic.com) / CC BY-NC

In this episode of CCYSC Awaaz, Pooja Agarwal discusses the experiences and work of Savitha Suresh Babu, Kirana Kumari, Pavitra and Nanjundaswamy at Baduku Centre for Livelihoods Learning, Samvada, Bengaluru. The college offers short term courses on socially critical domains such as education, journalism, sustainable development, and justice. 

Savitha Suresh Babu works as a faculty member at Baduku Centre for Livelihoods Learning; currently working with the centre for transformative education, co-convening a course called 'Learner Lecturer: an online course for the transformative educator' meant for college lecturers, to sharpen their understanding of higher education, as also sharpen their teaching skills. Previously she has co-convened a course called Hita (roughly translates from Kannada as comfort): a course in basic counselling, offered in the evenings for working professionals. 

Kirana Kumari is currently the Principal of Baduku Community College. For several years now, she worked as the convenor of the Center for Wellness and Justice. Before joining Samvada, she worked in Odanadi Seva Trust between 2000-2001. She worked with the MHRD Education Department Mahila Samakhya Karnataka between 1989 and 1999.  In Samvada, since November 2001, Kirana has played a range of roles including that of a Youth Work Resource Center Convenor, Convenor, Center for Wellness and Justice, Baduku Community College. Passionate about social justice and equity, she is part of several people’s movements that work with anti-caste and feminist ideologies, and for communal harmony. 

Pavitra and Nanjundswamy alumni are involved with a Counseling Course on Facilitating Women's Wellness and Justice, and sustainable organic farming respectively. 

Hosted and edited by Pooja Agarwal, MA Education, Ambedkar University Delhi. 

Music:  Little Idea by Scott Holmes (scottholmesmusic.com) / CC BY-NC

A transcript of the episode in English is available here. 

In this episode of CCYSC Awaaz, Dr Anandini Dar, Assistant Professor, School of Education Studies, Ambedkar University Delhi and Dr Ethiraj Gabriel Dattatreyan, senior lecturer at Department of Anthropology, Goldsmiths, University of London talk about youth, cities and the global discussing Dr Gabriel's recently published book The Globally Familiar: Digital Hip Hop, Masculinity, and Urban Space in Delhi. 

Edited by Nipunika Sachdeva

Music:  Little Idea by Scott Holmes (scottholmesmusic.com) / CC BY-NC

In this episode of CCYSC Awaaz, Paromita Vohra and Suchismita Chattophadyay discuss the journey of Agents of Ishq, the changing discourses around pleasure and sexuality among young people in the digital landscape. They explore the ideas of desire, consent, morality and the language surrounding these phenomena.

Paromita is a film-maker, writer and founder of Agents of Ishq. It is a multimedia platform talking about desire, love and sex. As she says it, the Shah Rukh Khan of sex-ed. Her notable documentaries include Where's Sandra, Q2P and Girls Un-limited. 

Suchismita Chattopadhyay is a PhD candidate in the Department of Anthropology and Sociology at the Graduate Institute, Geneva. Her PhD is an ethnography of grooming schools in Delhi, where she looks at how aspirations of young people are realised through such institutes.

Edited by Nipunika Sachdeva

Music:  Little Idea by Scott Holmes (scottholmesmusic.com) / CC BY-NC

In this episode of CCYSC Awaaz, Dr John Wall and Dr Tanu Biswas discuss the history of childism, and how insights from the global south enrich childist thinking. Dr Wall and Dr Biswas talk about their personal and scholarly journeys, research, how childism relates to other ‘isms’ such as feminism and post-colonialism, as well as its close affinity to decolonial sensibilities. 

Dr John Wall is a theoretical ethicist whose research and teaching focus on the groundwork of moral life. He is particularly interested in moral life’s relations to language, power, culture, and childhood. His work falls into three main areas: post-structuralist ethics; political theory; and childhoods and children’s rights. He is the director of the Childism Institute at Rutgers University – Camden (https://www.childism.org/). He is also co-founder of the Children’s Voting Colloquium (https://www.childrenvoting.org/), a worldwide collaboration of child and youth suffrage scholars and activists.

Dr Tanu Biswas is an interdisciplinary philosopher of education who is particularly interested in the philosophical richness that children and childhood offer adults. She is currently working on the educational value of children’s civil disobedience for climate justice for adults. Previously she has researched diverse childhoods in Ladakh (India), Norway and Germany. She teaches as part of the M.A. Intersectionality Studies lecture series at the University of Bayreuth, Germany. For more information on her work visit https://www.tanubiswas.net/

Selected References

Biswas, T. (2020). Little Things Matter Much: Childist Ideas for a Pedagogy of Philosophy in an Overheated World. Munich: Himmelgrün.

Biswas, Tanu (2016): Cultivating simplicity as a way of life: insights from a study about everyday lives of Tibetan-Buddhist child monks in Ladakh. In Christoph Wulf (Ed.): Exploring Alterity in a Globalized World. Abingdon, Oxon, New York: Routledge, pp. 151–164

Josefsson, J., & Wall, J. (2020). Empowered inclusion: theorizing global justice for children and youth. Globalisations, from https://doi.org/10.1080/14747731.2020.1736853.

Wall, J. (2019). From Childhood Studies to Childism: Reconstructing the Scholarly and Social Imagination. Children’s Geographies, 17(6), 1–15

Edited by Nipunika Sachdeva

Music:  Little Idea by Scott Holmes (scottholmesmusic.com) / CC BY-NC

In this episode of CCYSC Awaaz, Joyeeta Dey and Dr. Amanda Gilbertson discuss their research on desegregation and the common school system in India, specifically in Lucknow. They analyze how a desegregation policy gets translated into an access policy by middle-class actors at various levels - from the state officials to public intellectuals to school leadership to teachers - and read against the grain of how the policy is interpreted by the poor families who avail of it.

Dr. Amanda Gilbertson is a Senior Research Fellow in Anthropology at the University of Melbourne. Her research interests lie in the reproduction and contestation of class and gender inequalities in urban India. She is the author of Within the Limits: Moral Boundaries of Class and Gender in Urban India (Oxford University Press, 2017). 

Edited by Elizabeth Dillenburg  (Assistant Professor, Department of History, The Ohio State University-Newark)

Music:  Little Idea by Scott Holmes (scottholmesmusic.com) / CC BY-NC