Who Counts as Child? Using Child as Method and Fanon to Challenge Figurations of Childhood

Abstract

Child as method is a critical and interdisciplinary approach interrogating figurations of childhood that engage, organize, justify (and perhaps even resist) sociopolitical processes. In this article, we start by presenting Child as method as a conceptual and methodological tool for critical research in childhood, education, and psychological studies and then show how it informed discussions of and about childhood in two different projects. The first concerns Legal Gender Recognition in the United Kingdom where a Child as method perspective highlights how the idea of developmentalism is embedded in figurations of childhood. This aligns with age conformities of “being more like adults than children,” while also showing how gender recognition and childhood have been built in opposition to each other. The second project mobilizes Child as method as a conceptual and methodological orientation to critically reflect on the role-played by age assessment practices in migration control in Greece. This highlights how “the child” becomes a trope within forced migration policies and practices, and how “childhood” performs a social condition in which children are represented as victims in state and humanitarian discourse. In doing so, this not only creates a “universalised” notion of childhood but also enacts epistemic violence. Indeed, these discourses mobilize action in the form of age assessment for those young people who do not look or perform like “real children,” establishing, in essence, who is and is not welcomed in the Western territory. The article ends by discussing Frantz Fanon as a critical childhood theorist. It depicts how Fanon’s contribution informs, conceptually and methodologically, the research analytic of Child as method. Together with Child as method, we put forward Fanon’s contribution to critical childhood studies while highlighting Fanon’s call for action from everyone, including children.

Do children carry the seeds of novelty and revolutionary processes? Does saying this involve a provocative or an essentialist view of childhood? Where does children’s role in different forms of struggle fit in? Inspired by these questions, in this article, we discuss Child as method (hereafter Cam [Burman, 2016, 2018, 2019b, 2024]) as a conceptual-methodological approach that engages with, problematizes, and deconstructs dichotomies in and about childhood. ¹ This conceptual and methodological piece reviews the contributions of Cam to critical childhood studies, drawing on how Cam has informed two research projects, first, on age requirements for Legal Gender Recognition and, second, on age assessment within migration control. In both projects, Cam helps us explore liminal ideas of childhood in which, as we will argue, children are either absent, blurred, erased, or, alternatively, need to perform as “real children” attaining a universalized idea of childhood. Finally, we recover Frantz Fanon’s (1980, 1989, 2001, 2008) work (which heavily influences Cam) as a resource to counter claims within dominant discourses of childhood in relation to essentialization, recognition, and revolution.

Child as Method (Not Children as Method)

Cam is a critical approach in childhood studies proposed by the third author, Erica Burman (2019b), especially as discussed in her book Child as Method: Fanon, Education, Action (see also Burman, 2019a, 2022a, 2022b, 2023a, 2023b, 2024). More recently, it has been taken up and expanded by academics from different countries and disciplines and in different fields of research (e.g., Cassal et al., 2023; Katz & Dunker, 2019; Mattos & Moura e Silva, 2023; Millei et al., 2022). The third author has previously focused on critiquing the construction and reiteration of dominant models of childhood in developmental psychology (Burman, 2017), while demonstrating how children have become tropes in geopolitical struggles around individual, national, and international development (Burman, 2021). More recently, explicitly topicalized through Child as method, the third author (Burman, 2018, 2019b, 2022b, 2024) has engaged with figurations of childhood as analytical tools to understand and challenge neoliberal politics governing not only children but societal practices more generally.

Hence, in this analysis, children are organizing figurations rather than objects of discourses. Thus, contextualized discourses of childhood are read as indicating efforts and strategies for keeping “children” as a coherent (and linear) category. On the figurations of childhood, we also draw on Castañeda’s (2002) discussions about how ideas of childhood are culturally and discursively constructed by procedures, knowledge, and technologies, portraying “child” as a human being that is still incomplete (in opposition to a stable idea of adulthood), and furthermore open to being directed and exploited. In previous work, the third author (Burman, 2018, 2019b, 2022b) goes further in this debate to understand how figurations of childhood connect different relations and practices and political debates and interventions, that are around and engaged by childhood, whether they might be about children (as a topic) or with children (as a subject). In her words, “‘Child as method’ involves resisting the traditional modern and Western abstraction of the child from sociopolitical relations that position it as ‘other’” (Burman, 2019b, p. 135). This is the other that, in Foucauldian terms, supports the existence of the norm and the normal (Foucault, 1979, 1990, 2003). As it has been explained (Burman, 2019b), Cam draws upon queer, feminist, decolonial, and critical studies to better understand social discourses of childhood, and their effects on social relations, politics, imagination, pedagogies, therapies, and knowledge.

We further highlight the significance of mobilization of and engagement with Fanon’s work to situate children as important figures for conducting social-political diagnosis. We see Fanon as challenging colonial structures of domination in which the “developed” (the adult, but also the colonizer, and—by extension in our analysis, as also in Cannella and Viruru, 2004– the classical educator) presumes to know more and/or better (than the child, but also the colonized, and the classically schooled or schoolified pupil). This binary (and colonial) view between “developed” and “underdeveloped” treats knowledge as a “good” (or resource) belonging to some and lacking in others. Crucial links between models of individual psychological, national and international development by interrogating the role played by child/children/childhood within these civilizational, colonial discourses. Moreover, by criticizing the idea of development, alternative views become possible. Discussing Child as method, the third author (Burman, 2017, 2019b, 2021, 2022a, 2022b) has challenged discourses around childhood and development that manifest across pedagogical and psychological practices, geopolitics, and research. Following Fanon, she stresses (Burman, 2019b) how a Fanonian analysis can make space to understand social change and transformation and can make childhood an especially useful exemplar that connects psychoanalytically-informed thinking to anti-colonial struggles. As the authors of this article see it, taking Fanon’s corpus of writings offered Child as method a key arena in which to explore and identify the positions of children (and related ideas including adolescence, youth, development, and [im]maturity) in his texts and arguments (Burman, 2019b, 2024). We will return to Fanon’s work in a later section to specify how his work helps us to understand further the figurations of childhood we topicalize here.

It is worth noting that Cam both connects and contrasts with other recent critical approaches in childhood studies such as Childism (Burman, 2022a). While Childism focuses on bringing children to the center of academic and political debates on childhood (Wall, 2022), Cam further discusses those who may not or cannot be categorized as children but are nevertheless implied or interpellated by discourses of childhood and development (Burman, 2019b, 2022a). As the third author explains, “Child as method is therefore concerned with the (structural and subjectively occupied) positions produced for and about children” (Burman, 2019b, p. 188). In this way, it becomes a research analytic tool not only for and about children and childhood but also for those who cannot be identified as children. As we show later, this includes gender nonconforming children who lack Legal Gender Recognition (Cassal, 2023, 2024), and young migrants who often need to undergo age assessment to prove whether they are “real” children or adults (Christinaki, 2024).

Hence, Cam allows us to critically explore topics and debates that may otherwise be excluded from childhood studies, in addition to looking at how figurations of childhood also organize those who are not considered children, and so implicates wider social and geopolitical axes. This is why Cam is not about researching with children (although it could include this) but rather a research analytic that exposes childhood (and corresponding debates) in its very absence. We highlight that Cam has also been used in research with children in several fields. For instance, as a means to interrogate “datafication,” data-based learning and assessment in early childhood education (Pierlejewski, 2023). Similarly, it has been used in psychoanalytical intervention to explore how children are impacted by the destruction of the Brazilian rainforest by the State and private companies (Katz & Dunker, 2019). In both cases, research is not only conducted with children, but it also considers other human, nonhuman, and more-than-human actors.

Research: Cam in Practice

Having outlined our framework and approach, we now move on to discuss two specific examples, illustrating what a Cam analysis can contribute to understanding the social and political roles played by children and childhood.

The Child Who Is Not There: Child as Method and Legal Gender Recognition

Our first example draws on doctoral research conducted by the first author between 2019 and 2024, with support of the second and under supervision of the third (see Cassal, 2024 for the full analysis). Combining critical psychology and psychoanalysis, education, childhood studies, and queer and trans studies, this interdisciplinary work develops further the role of Cam in analyzing figurations of childhood even when children seem to be absent from discourses and practices.

In terms of context, in January 2023, the then Conversative-led British government for the first time in its history blocked a bill passed by the Scottish Parliament (which has had some independent powers to introduce legislation since 1999). This was the Gender Recognition Reform—Scotland Bill (hereafter GRR-S), which sought to reform the 2004 Gender Recognition Act (GRA), a piece of legislation guaranteeing trans people’s the right to obtain a Gender Recognition Certificate and legally recognize their “acquired gender” (as opposed, in a binary model, to the attributed sex as assigned at birth). The GRR-S was planned to follow similar principles from the GRA, however, it also proposed changes to the requirements to facilitate and expand access for trans applicants. One of the major changes would have been the lowering of minimum age of applicants from 18 to 16 years (Cassal, 2023). While the main research procedures have been discussed elsewhere (Cassal, 2024), the important aspect to note here is the role played by figurations of childhood in this debate.

Our first interrogation is about the emergence of children in those discourses. While on a cursory reading of the current legislation, the GRA has no mention of children, on closer analysis the characteristics of a successful applicant explicitly contrast with those expected from a child. As Grabham (2010) noted early on, the GRA has chronological requirements built upon the presumption that gender is stable and irreversible, hence expecting maturity, stability, and irreversibility. This is a figuration of a developmentalist childhood, although it should be emphasized that children are not mentioned at all (Cassal, 2023; 2024). Therefore, what appears to be a debate about adults also includes children as the idealized or normalized/typical others. Although there might be several reasons why children are excluded from these debates (e.g., Breslow, 2021; Cassal, 2024), we stress here the role of figurations of childhood in regulating adult lives.

Moreover, even when the GRR-S proposes lowering the minimum age, this is not done by letting children access Legal Gender Recognition rights. Rather, the GRR-S maintains irreversibility (which is a key term in a linear, developmentalist lexicon) as a criterion, just proposing instead some special considerations for those aged 16 or 17. These legal minors would be in an in-between position, neither children nor adults, in one word, adolescents (Cassal, 2024). Hence, the requirements are still built upon figurations of childhood as incomplete subjects who, following a developmentalist trajectory, will someday become eligible for Legal Gender Recognition rights. Children are absent from the regulations but remain present precisely because of the recourse to figuring them as something else.

The second aspect raised by this Cam analysis is how dominant discourses of gender recognition and childhood have been formulated in opposition to each other. We draw on psychoanalytic theory and queer theory to understand the unconscious role played by figurations of childhood. Because gender is performatively produced (Butler, 1990, 1993), the possibilities of identification, recognition, and account of oneself are shaped by discursive conditions of possibility made available by current frames (Butler, 1997a, 1997b, 2005, 2016). We interpret the aversion to gender nonconforming childhood as relating to gender melancholy, raising unconscious defenses (Butler, 1995, 1997a), and challenging the position of childhood as a resource for or investment in a predictable future (Breslow, 2021; Edelman, 2004; Favero, 2020). In other words, the idea of gender nonconforming childhoods engages unconscious and unbearable feelings of loss, which work counter to the primary figuration of childhood as linear and developmental. Once rendered unacceptable, these disavowed feelings are not even named; hence, lowering the minimum age for Legal Gender Recognition (as in the case above) creates a new category instead of dealing with the contradictions of childhood. Thus, those expectations oppose gender normativity and childhood, so justifying the exclusion of children from Legal Gender Recognition rights (Cassal, 2023, 2024).

It might appear that children are lost in this debate. Yet, there remain claims for gender nonconforming children’s recognition despite gender melancholy ² because it is not the only unconscious force at play (see Cassal, 2024). In the United Kingdom in 2023, there were several vigils gathering hundreds and even thousands of people to mourn the death of Brianna Ghey, a 16-year-old trans girl murdered (by other young people) in Warrington, in the North-West of England. This movement and moment of remembrance could be seen as going from melancholy to mourning and collective reparation (Butler, 1990, 2005, 2016, 2020; Freud & Phillips, 2005). In addition, the blocking of the GRR-S in Scotland led to public demonstrations in favor of the passed Bill which, although we can acknowledge its limitations, would nevertheless have made lives better for marginalized groups of trans people. As analyzed in detail in Cassal (2024), these nonviolent protests and mobilizations (Butler, 2020) show ways in which people can recognize and support each other, including children, and in spite of prevailing structures of gender melancholy.

In terms of Legal Gender Recognition, Cam recalls unconscious processes about childhood that, it would seem, could not be named as such. Demonstrations and collective organizing are ways to overcome gender melancholy, whether about represented or embodied children (Cassal, 2024). As we will see later in this paper, in dialogue with Frantz Fanon’s (2008) body of work, this is an invitation for action and, perhaps, revolution.

Child as Method in Forced Migration: Age Assessment

Our second example is based on work about psychosocial practices conducted as part of and during the doctoral research of the second author (Christinaki, 2022b; see also Christinaki, 2022a) under the supervision of the third and the constructive comments of the first author. It mobilizes the research analytic of Cam to critically discuss the tool of age assessment ³ within migration control. We use Cam as a lens to read discourses on child/children/childhood within forced migration. Space constraints allow us only to discuss briefly how “the child” is understood as a figure or trope within forced migration and (both individual child, and national and international, economic) development, and second, how “childhood” performs as a social condition in which children are represented and discussed as victims in state and humanitarian discourse (for an in-depth discussion see Christinaki [2024 ⁴ ]).

It should be recalled that national-state immigration policies, including the European Union, strategically use children to constitute themselves (as well as the children) as innocent and good within the field of migration and the humanitarian landscape. Child rights also figure within and are aligned with specific national imaginaries, imaginaries that shape and objectify children in a neoliberal and Western way (see Hennum & Aamodt, 2021). As McLaughlin (2018) describes, the foregrounding of children as victims led to the emergence of a humanitarian discourse of “crisis,” constituted upon the politics of innocence and vulnerability that attempts to define a “universal childhood.” On the same note, Heidbrink (2021) highlights,

. . . focusing on the vulnerabilities of increasingly narrow categories of individuals, such as unaccompanied children, distracts from examining how state policies produce vulnerability. Second, the humanitarian organisations’ emphasis on vulnerability re-inscribes social boundaries, making state protections and services progressively difficult to access. In so doing, both the state and humanitarian organisations govern youth mobility through vulnerability. (p. 988)

In the case of Greece, where part of this research study was conducted, any young person who is considered an unaccompanied minor, a “child,” is accommodated in special units (separated from adults) that are called “Safe Zones.” Usually, these units are in mainland Greece and are considered better in terms of accommodation (i.e., stone buildings, rather than the containers mainly comprising accommodation in refugee camps), commodities, and benefits, given that most of the refugee population lives in camps (and some of them may remain there indefinitely). In this context, age assessment is mobilized as a strategy to indicate, examine, and “prove” whether someone is a “child” or an “adult.” It is worth noting that age assessments are often conducted when people do not appear to the assessor to “look” like “real children,” aiming, therefore, to attest to whether the person deserves (or not) these extra resources and special protections. The latter is crucial because when someone is over 18 years old, they are usually asked to leave the zone and find accommodation elsewhere.

Hence, the overemphasis on children and “womenandchildren” (Sylvester, 1998; but also, Burman, 2008) in state and humanitarian discourse and the strategic use of the tool of age assessment has a twofold implication in our analysis and understanding. This is because it not only reiterates the construction of universal and idealized notions of children (and women) but, most importantly, it shifts the focus from the atrocities taking place at the very spaces that migrants, including young people and women, have been and are still asked to pass through, stay in and endure in the present moment. Here, we include the risk of death crossing the Mediterranean Sea, the disgraceful existence and conditions within detention centers, “hotspots” ⁵ and camps, not to mention the everyday frustrations, obstacles, and hostilities of the bureaucratic immigration system.

This is one of the reasons that we suggest thinking Cam and migration together (notwithstanding how children are—rather surprisingly—absent in influential discussions of migration such as Mezzadra & Neilson, 2013), not to reinforce the medical and legal positionings of who constitutes a child but rather to expose the atrocities and the subjective dimensions childhood and migration bring within the European territory (and beyond). This is a material process where Europe becomes a fortress and constructs notions of interiority that take place in individuals (see Steedman, 1995).

In terms of the second, how “childhood” is understood as a social condition or category where different narratives about and for the child are produced, it is worth highlighting how the institutional discourses of state and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) spatialize childhood and migration. By “spatialize” we address the forms of accommodation that migrants are typically required to endure. In the case of Greece, this means detention centers, hotspots, and camps, and occasionally hotels or apartments often located on the outskirts of cities. The term “spatialize” also connotes how migrants are accommodated within hotspots and camps. For instance, “women and children” are portrayed as one vulnerable category inseparable from each other that is accommodated in distinct territories within hotspots and camps. According to Hyndman and Giles (2011), this indicates not only how “womenandchildren” are combined into one monolithic category, but it also reveals the way refugees, overall, are feminized as a space of “womenandchildren” (see also Enloe, 1993 as cited in Hyndman & Giles, 2011), as voiceless and passive subjectivities (with consequences for all parties, including men, women, children and of course other/all genders as well as generations).

This is the reason why it is important to attend to the way children are, and childhood as a social condition is, represented and discussed in states’ discourse as victims. By contrast, anyone who claims or embraces the legal category of the child but does not perform as (what is recognized within dominant understandings as) a “real child” is dealt with suspicion based on which the tool of age assessment is deployed. Bringing to attention how gender and race play out as social markers in forced migration, we argue that age assessment within the context of migration should be contextualized within a postcolonial understanding. Here is where Fanon is particularly useful, as it is not by accident that very often males are represented as “villain” or “dangerous” ⁶ while “womenandchildren” (Sylvester, 1998) as vulnerable. Recall the extensive literature that connects 9/11 with racialized and gendered understandings and Islamophobia (Younis, 2022). We need to think and critically reflect on this domain. This is where Cam challenges the culture and gender-free elaborations of dominant universalized understandings of childhood inscribing international policy instruments, alongside showing the partialities enacted by variable readings of the presumed stable and incontrovertible adult–child binary.

Frantz Fanon: A Theorist of Childhood?

Fanon’s (1980, 1989, 2001, 2008) body of work is closely engaged by Cam, especially with and around the present and absent figurations of childhood (Burman, 2019b). Despite his death at a young age, Fanon left substantial writings that have received different interpretations across the years, have been translated into several languages, and mobilized in many disciplines across the world (Bhabha, 1994; Ellena, 2001; Gates, 1991; Pirelli & Love, 2015). His contributions to education are evident (see, for example, Dei & Simmons, 2010; Leonardo & Singh, 2017), although not sufficiently investigated yet (see Burman, 2022a). Following Burman’s discussion of distinct political agencies mobilized around specific figurations of childhood indicated by Fanon’s work, we discuss how Fanon can be seen as an author connecting children and revolution from a nonessentialist perspective.

By the 1950s, Fanon had worked as a psychiatrist in Algeria, until he resigned in protest over French colonial domination (Fanon, 1980), and moved to Tunisia. There, he finished his second book, and Haakon Chevalier was the first to translate it to English in 1970 ⁷ as Studies in a Dying Colonialism (Macey, 2012), hereafter SDC (Fanon, 1989). It underwent specific restrictions in its circulation in the French context as a denial of the Algerian Colonial War ⁸ (Ellena, 2001), as well as Fanon’s radical anti-colonial and anticapitalist positions (Srivastava, 2015). These revolutionary positions are very useful for our reflections.

In SDC, Fanon (1989) discusses the ongoing Algerian independence revolution, ⁹ or the French colonial war to keep hold of Algeria. Studying contextual conflicts is one of many qualities of Fanonian work (Gates, 1991); Fanon speaks about ongoing anti-colonial conflicts, and we take this point as useful think of sociopolitical interventions in the present, that is, not only as things are (which may include current colonial domination) but in terms of what could be (the anti-colonial revolution). In other words, Fanon addresses Algerian people, groups, and communities thriving against and despite French colonial domination. Although he was personally horrified by violence and pain (Macey, 2012; Pirelli & Love, 2015), and despite his direct support and engagement to armed conflict (Fanon, 1980), Fanon reflected and wrote about violence in Algerian resistance from a nonjudgmental position. Specifically, when it came to the discussion around children, rather than seeing them as part of the conflict or just victims to be protected, he considered their role as active protagonists within the anti-colonial struggles.

Fanon (1980) makes his point clearer in essays he wrote ¹⁰ for the Algerian National Liberation Front’s (or FLN in French) journal El Moudjahid, stating that “All the degrading and infantilizing structures that habitually infest the relations between the colonized and the colonizer were suddenly liquidated” (p. 102). In another paper for the same journal, Fanon calls on the “Youth of Africa” (p. 113) to rise up against colonial domination because “[i]t is essential that the oppressed peoples join up with the peoples who are already sovereign” (p. 114). Reinforcing previous analysis (Burman, 2019b), in Fanon’s work, and particularly in his political essays, childhood can be a trope for colonial domination but also a pivot of liberation. It is not because they are children that they would rise, but as children they should also rise.

Fanon (2018) presented key considerations of the role of the colonial State in producing, engaging, and harming childhood, as well as psychosocial practices to resist to and repair psychic harm, informing further studies in several fields such as psychology, education, and cultural studies. Hence, Fanon’s debates of figurations of childhood in colonial struggle are one of the major resources for Cam as an approach. Fanon challenges the idea of children as bearers of innocence or futurity, portraying them as political actors engaged in the time of now, even as they can also be casualties of this time (as his case examples in Wretched of the Earth graphically highlight—see Fanon, 1989).

“Always Too Late, Never Too Late”: Fanon, Childhood, Revolution

As we have discussed, figurations of childhood are present in Legal Gender Recognition policies and practices for trans people and in age assessment for young migrants. However, figurations of childhood are also opportunities to reverse colonial domination using Fanon’s (2008) double affirmation about being “too late.” As Fanon (2008) argues, we are always “too late” to overcome colonialism, because it has already been established and frames the terms in which we identify ourselves. Fanon’s position, though, is not a fatalist one. By acknowledging that we cannot return to a pre-colonial reality, he invites action in the present time—because we would be already too late, therefore with no time to wait. In Fanon, we see the reasoning for acting against racism and colonialism immediately—rather than in the future. Action is also prompted because of childhood, but this is in terms of who they are now, to have a different (nonlinear) future, or an alternative to colonial domination and submission. Returning to the first research project (Cassal, 2023, 2024), if Cam brings underlying figurations of childhood in Legal Gender Recognition, Fanonian analytical lens highlight the revolutionary role of childhood toward new forms of solidarity for legal recognition (whether about gender or not).

People often mobilize in the name of children, to ask for something that is not there. In the case of blocking the GRR-S, this also speaks of national identity and autonomy (Scotland as part of the United Kingdom but also submitted to central government’s decisions). There is plenty of loss (of Brianna Ghey’s life, of the Scottish Parliament’s autonomy) and despite that—or because of that—people gather and ask for change. That is the revolutionary potential taking place as action. Hence, as in a psychoanalytic interpretation (which Fanon was inspired by; see Fanon, 2008) what is considered by analysis as traumatic experiences cannot be erased or healed, but rather elaborated. This point relates to Freud and Phillips’s (2005) considerations about multiple (and sometimes unclear) ways by which melancholy is overcome. Butler (2005), in turn, highlights that gender melancholy is part of our unconscious existence rather than a “problem” to be solved. Applying this to our current discussion (see Cassal, 2024), what the revolutionary processes create is an opportunity to challenge the consequences of gender melancholy—the exclusion of certain groups from accessing Legal Gender Recognition based on figurations of childhood.

Along the same line of argument, and in relation to the second project, if Cam opens the space to critically interrogate figurations of childhood within forced migration, state and humanitarian discourse, Fanon and the post/de/anti-colonial lens that Cam encompasses, push us to unpack how “the child” becomes a trope, with “childhood” as a social condition that tries to reconstitute European states as innocent and good. In doing so, it reveals intimate imperialist and colonial legacies that ask us to act—now. To act not only for children’s rights within the neoliberal human rights discourse but to act against the atrocities taking place at the Mediterranean Sea, the state-humanitarian matrix within hotspots and camps, as well as the racist and Islamophobic mentalities that underline the way Europe and European states frame who (and when) deserves protection and who does not.

Fanon’s “too late” encompasses both sociopolitical conditions and unconscious formulations, as a call in and for action in the present moment. As we read Fanon’s words, it is always too late (to change the past), but never too late (to act in the present). If no action was possible, there would then be no responsibility for transformation, opposing Fanon’s claims. Fanon stresses that there are still opportunities for action now:

For Fanon colonialism meant the end of time for the colonized. Having been expelled from history, the colonized could recover only in the struggle against colonialism. The two apparently contradictory notions of time, being in one’s time and also being removed from time and thus stuck in another’s time, are illuminated in the “epochal” anticolonial struggles for freedom. The struggle helps recover the time before colonialism and revalorizes cultures and practices by grounding them in the struggle to gain back land and dignity. (Gibson, 2011, p. 4)

To “recover the time before colonialism” means to take action in the present, as well as to be liberated from the timeless stuckness of the colonial condition—since, as Fanon (2018) so graphically highlighted, colonialism erases time and history, to make the colonized forget that there was ever anything other than the colonial situation. In other words, while we cannot reverse violence and domination already imposed by colonialism (and its structures of power), nonetheless, there is a need to transform and disassemble oppressions, a call for action now, in the present that disrupts the timelessness and paralysis of oppression, and opens up new possibilities. That happens when people gather despite the State (Butler, 2000, 2020; Fanon, 1989) to fight for rights—whether about trans and gender nonconforming people or migrants’ rights overall. This is also the point of this article, in which three critical psychologists/educationalists/academics use Cam to analyze and challenge inequities and violations done in the name of childhood. Because of colonialism, it is always too late to avoid violence and domination but never too late to act in the present. “Too late” does not mean that the struggle is over. It is “too late” to revert reality to an imagined pre-existent world as it would have been before violence and exclusions.

Fanon’s theoretical, clinical, political, and methodological works are calls for action, calls to us all, for and as the oppressed. Concerning figurations of childhood, this means considering that it is “too late” to reach the idealized innocent child while also not “too late” to create alternatives. Fanon’s (2008, p. 180) conclusive point in Black Skin White Masks is that “the tragedy of the child is that he was once a man.” By mobilizing Nietzsche, Fanon puts forward a psychoanalytically-informed commitment that acknowledges the productive (and sometimes traumatic) impacts of the historical, intergenerational, and biographical experience of people, which, however, he argues, as impactful as it is, is not determining. Returning to our initial questions, we stay with contradictions. It is indeed too late to undo the naturalized expectations of children as bearers of change (in a developmentalist and linear idea of change). They come to a world in which power relations (including colonial domination) are already in place and which they must learn how to navigate to survive, if possible, as well as decide on whether to act against (or with) them. Nonetheless, it is never too late for people (whether children or adults) to act to guarantee survival for all the oppressed. For trans and gender nonconforming people aged 16 and 17 in Scotland, there might not have enough time to reverse the blocking of the GRR-S before they reach legal adulthood, ¹¹ but the struggle continues for others who could benefit from it soon. Also, the loss of Brianna Ghey is irremediable, but it still shows the need for protection for those who are here.

Similarly, it is “too late” to reverse the atrocities and multiple forms of violence migrants endure while coming or staying in Greece and Europe, but it is never “too late” to fight for migrants’ rights in local and international movements and demand the opening of borders, the eradication of disgraceful places such as the hotspots and camps, and dignity in asylum processes. Throughout the doctoral study of the second author, there were multiple and well-supported sites of resistance within migration in Greece. These included protests led by migrants within and outside of hotspots and camps, workers’, anti-racist, anti-fascist, and feminist solidarity marches, as well as LGBTQ+ solidarity networks among other solidarity movements. There were also documented instances of children and young people also resisting in various ways the categorizations and conditions imposed on them (Christinaki, 2024).

The lessons left by Fanon are incorporated in Cam as analytical tools to interrogate the politics of waiting and exclusion operating both in legal gender recognition and in forced migration. People live and act today, and this is a revolutionary position against colonial domination. Change has to come; whether it might be too late for revolution, it is never too late to keep trying.