Pour ce troisième colloque sur la misopédie, nous aborderons les représentations artistiques des relations d’âge incluant les plus jeunes. Films, téléfilms, romans, pièces de théâtre, musiques populaires, chorégraphies, etc. jouent un rôle fondamental et colossal dans la transmission de repères intersubjectifs et institutionnels misopèdes ou, au contraire, enfantistes. Pour ce troisième colloque, comme pour les deux précédents, on se concentrera sur la période contemporaine. La nécessité d’une approche intersectionnelle enfantiste et éco-enfantiste est patente pour le monde de la recherche.

University of Limoges, France, October 8^th and 9^th 2026

Argument

Misopaedia refers to the hatred of children (in the same way that misogyny refers to the hatred of women): the most often unconscious feeling of contempt brought upon the youth, a rejection of the children from the ways of the polis. Being or having been a child is the one and only shared universal experience for every human being on the planet. And yet, generation after generation, humans seem unable to empathize with childhood after outgrowing it. What we call here misopaedia might not be universal, but it is fairly widespread, and it varies according to time and place. 

The fact is most adults would strongly refuse to endure what they impose on children on a daily basis. If they were in a capacity to defend themselves, adults wouldn’t agree to: being forced to sit still for hours, when physical movement is a basic need, being shouted at, being given precise times for urinating, being hit, being threatened, being blackmailed, being punished for showing emotions (remember that anger comes along as a natural expression when a limit has not been acknowledged... the egg comes from the hen, that comes from the egg), being mocked with oppressive sarcasm, and so on. 

Our concern is precisely that children in today’s society have no way of defending themselves. They are physically weaker, they have no financial, social or emotional autonomy and, most importantly, they are not protected by the law. To this day, children are the only population group still deprived of fundamental rights, or in other words confined to the legal status of ‘minor’. The same was true about women in France until 1938, if not until 1965.

This violence is experienced as a continuum. In France in 2025, the authorities estimate that 1child is sexually assaulted every 3 minutes. Upstream, this alarming number coincides with very strong habitus of dominating and overpowering the children, mostly in the name of ‘education’. 

Why do adults individually and systematically allow themselves so much violence towards younger people? Why does equal dignity seem so unattainable? Misopedia provides an answer to this question.

To date, a large body of international scientific work has shown domination and discrimination as phenomena, in the light of ethnic or racial affiliation, gender, sexual orientation and religious choice. Meanwhile, the study of ageism (age discrimination) is developing, but it generally concerns the oldest people or the ‘young’, i.e. people who are no longer children. Surprisingly, the various researches regarding to care, in the United States and France, almost systematically dismiss the huge part of the population that cannot survive without receiving care: children.

A first-ever international and transdisciplinary conference was held in October 2024 at the University of Limoges, aiming to define the concept of misopedia. Laying the academic groundwork for this research helps explain the structural adultism that characterizes our current society. After analyzing the concept and demonstrating that all disciplinary fields are concerned by this phenomenon, a second conference in October 2025 allowed for further reflection. This second conference focused on misopedia within institutions. Indeed, institutions, including those whose objective is to protect, educate, or care for young people, can actively contribute to fostering systemic misopedia.

For this third conference, we will address another essential socio-cultural aspect that influences the entire population: artistic representations of age relationships including young people. Films, television movies, novels, plays, popular music, choreography, and so on, play a fundamental and enormous role in the transmission of either misopedic or, conversely, childist intersubjective and institutional markers. The imagination is a powerful tool for colonizing the mind with certain ideologies (misopedic thinking refers to the ideology that children are inherently bad), or, on the contrary, for offering alternative and emancipated representations. 

For this third conference, as for the two previous ones, we will focus on the contemporary period.

Since the first conference two years ago, French society has made significant progress in recognizing its structural misopedia. The need for an intersectional, childist, and eco-childist approach is evident to the research community.

International and interdisciplinary conference organized by Cécile Kovacshazy, Associate Professor accredited to supervise research in Comparative Literature

Timetable

9th February 2026: deadline for submitting proposals.

Contact: cecile.kovacshazy@unilim.fr 

Between half a page and one page, a short bibliography, a title, a short biography. Proposals will be considered under an anonymous double reading procedure.

23 March 2026: decision by the scientific committee

Scientific committee 

• Laelia Benoit, pédopsychiatrie, Yale University, USA
• Tanu Biswas, philosophie de l’éducation, Universitetet i Stavanger, Norvège
• Anandini Dar, child studies, BML Munjal University, India
• Eleonora Florio, psychologie, Università degli studi di Bergamo, Italie
• Cécile Kovacshazy, littératures comparées, Université de Limoges, France
• Mathilde Lévêque, littératures françaises, Université de Sorbonne Paris Nord, France 
• Toby Rollo, sciences politiques, Lakehead University, Canada
• John Wall, philosophie, Rutgers University, USA

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BONNARDEL Yves, La Domination adulte. L’oppression des mineurs, Méréville, Le Hêtre Myriadis, 2015.

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