What makes us hopeful about childhood at today’s crossroad?

Abstract

This text is a speech given at the closing conference of the I Luso-Afro-Brazilian Symposium and VI Luso-Brazilian Symposium on Child Studies, held at the UERJ, in August 2024. In this speech, I pointed out my concerns about the processes that are presented to us in a generic way, without respect for the specificities and the place of each people, social group. Also proposing notes on what "childhoods" could or could not be in these contexts. To this end, I will describe the text presented at the event, in which children, voices, bodies, wisdoms and knowledges are presented, suffocated by the Euro-north-white systems, under the necropoliticizing bias (Mbembe, 2018) that plaster and brutalize us, by not respecting and decentralizing the debate on different childhoods, whether they are: girls who go through other forms of education within the initiation rites, in Mozambique; within the religions of African origins, in Brazil; children from quilombola communities; of the native peoples; from the peripheries of our countries or from other spaces that are invisible and denied in their existence. These writings come from the need to talk about us, for us, from us. A speech anchored in our ancestors, by our elders, seeking to avoid generalizations. Any generalization can lead us to a practical and theoretical failure, as Bibi Bakarè-Yusuf (2003) teaches us.