Center hosts international symposium on children and integral human development

October 28, 2022

SPIRE: The Global Catholic Social Tradition Network gathered for a symposium on Children and Integral Human Development, at the Institute for Social Concerns October 6-8, 2022. The symposium convened more than 30 researchers, non-profit practitioners, and young people for three days to explore the theory and practice of a dignity-centered approach to childhood development, safety, and protection. “Integral Human Development” is an idea developed by Louis Joseph Lebret, a French Dominican social scientist, philosopher, and pioneer of development ethics who argued for the need for economies to serve people instead of the other way round. Pope Paul VI made the idea a central part of his encyclical “Populorum Progressio,” where he argued for the development of people as complete human beings irreducible to economic terms. 

SPIRE co-creator Bill Purcell, senior associate director of the Institute for Social Concerns, associate professor of the practice, and co-director of the Catholic Social Tradition Minor explained that “the network continues to grow and develop through symposia like this one, and the relationships developing between scholars and practitioners are really beginning to lead to on-the-ground changes in institutions and communities.” The symposium focused on three themes: “Children’s participation and solidarity,” “Listening to and learning from children, and “the common good and child-respecting institutions.” 

Those who addressed “Children’s participation and solidarity” took one of two general approaches. The first focused on how researchers and non-profit practitioners who work with children should pay careful attention to children’s representations and interpretations of their own experience. Mia Babic, from the War Childhood Museum in Sarajevo, presented a paper called “Challenging Children’s Victimhood: the War Childhood Museum as Space for Narratives of Individual  and Collective Resilience.” She shared childhood accounts of their experience in wartime and argued that they suggest a much more complex picture than accounts presenting victimhood as a passive condition. Many accounts gathered by the War Childhood Museum paint a picture with surprising degrees of childrens’ agency and resilience in violent situations.

Papers in the session also explored the salient features of children’s accounts of their own experiences in various contexts: religious communities, the digital world, wartime, the Church sex abuse scandal, English Catholic high schools, and developing countries. The second approach to children’s participation and solidarity looked at what it would mean in various settings to treat children as experts on their own experience, suggesting that privileging adult expertise obscures important elements of childrens’ experience.

“Listening to and learning from children” put into practice the child-centered approaches highlighted in the first session. Three students from Ukrainian Catholic University who are attending Notre Dame in an exchange program since their campus is under threat shared their experience of the early days of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Presentations during the third session continued to expand on the theme of revising and expanding views of children, childrens’ experience, and the institutions that serve children in light of the participation of children themselves. Fernanda Liberali, of the Pontifical University, Sao Paulo, presented a paper focused on the question of whether schools could be places where children design a more just world. She argued that pedagogies grounded in the classroom relational practices described by Paulo Freire and bell hooks create levels of trust and commitment that empower children to cocreate democratic educational models that translate into participatory political habits in adulthood.

Ethna Regan, of Dublin City University, explored what childhood might teach us about new possibilities for social life. She argued that our tendencies to see children as receivers of care prevents us from taking children and their experience seriously. If we were to shift from seeing them as care receivers, and see them as rights holders instead, we might begin to get inklings of other possibilities for social life. Those possibilities would privilege equality between children and adults in ways that might help prevent abuses like those that occurred in the Church sex abuse crisis.

Taken together the papers in the symposium offered a much expanded view of childhood and the institutions that serve children. It decentered adult perspectives on childhood and childrens’ experience and promised further work in new directions as scholars and practitioners exchanged contact information and hatched plans for new collaborative efforts. 

SPIRE: the Catholic Social Tradition Network brings together international scholars and practitioners to explore ways to apply the Church’s social teaching to concrete social problems that communities face around the world. Previous symposia were held in Rome, London, Jerusalem, and Kylemore Abbey near Galway, Ireland and examined questions of Catholic social teaching and community impact, the environment as a common good in the middle east, and human dignity and the law. The network exemplifies the center’s dedication to interdisciplinary connections and scholarship across the University and around the world. For more information about research initiatives at the center, go to socialconcerns.nd.edu/research-common-good.