Call for Papers Special Issue

Call for Abstracts

Young children’s perspectives on (multispecies) death and dying

Submission deadline: Thursday, 15 May 2025

This special edition examines the relationship between children, childhood(s) and death – a timely and urgent topic. Whilst a growing body of literature focuses on teacher and family perspectives on whether death is ‘appropriate’ to discuss with children, little research has focused on the perspectives of young children themselves. The second aim is to include the other/non/more-than-human in this examination.

Climate change, species extinction, environmental decline, COVID-19, Gaza and the Ukraine war have brought death and dying closer and more real for many children, also in the West. Children are aware of the existential threat that anthropogenic climate change poses to multispecies survival (Romeu, 2021). Although dying features in young children’s everyday lives (e.g., through the news or deaths of older relatives and pets), many adults avoid it as too sensitive and a potential cause of discomfort to adults or children (Bowie, 2000; Puskás et al., 2021). Much research is human-centred, and in the case of children and childhood(s), is grounded in developmental psychology. In particular, the little research about children’s perspectives concerns their acquisition of a ‘mature’ death concept, a term developed by Nagy (1948). Since the 1940s, the literature has concentrated on children’s developing understanding by the age of nine or ten that death is irreversible, universal and about non-functionality (Coombs, 2017). This is not the case with adult perceptions, where there is openness for more varied understandings of death and dying (Borgstrom & Visser, 2024). Unlike adult grief, it is also assumed that responses to child grief need to be developmentally appropriate (Alvis et al., 2022) and that children need to be shielded from such sensitive topics. This is because developmental theories still position infants and primary-aged children as ‘developing-adults’ and as ‘less-than’: innocent, vulnerable, fragile and ignorant (Murris, 2016). Before children are taught science concepts, their philosophical views are less grounded in Western binary logic (animate/inanimate, culture/nature, alive/dead, etc.), and we wonder what adults can learn from and with children about more animistic ways of inhabiting our lifeworlds. What happens to the adult ‘mature’ death concept when we include the other/non/more-than-human world (e.g., grieving about a river drying up or a dead star)? What important relational shifts (between adult-child, human-world, human-animal) are made when human-in-death research is decentred? Our baseline is that existential questions defy straightforward answers, also for adults.

This special issue seeks children’s own philosophical and other perspectives not only on human death but also on multispecies death and dying. The concept of ‘multispecies’ is not about acknowledging ‘​​multiple species’ but points to the unequal distribution of vulnerabilities between humans and other species and ecosystems. Rather than simply adding other species to the research frameworks, multispecies scholars engage with more uncertain ways of knowing and call for a deeper consideration of world-making and registers of difference (Tammi & Rautio, forthcoming).

Responding to the current gap in the literature, this special issue highlights the diversity in children’s perceptions of and responses to (multispecies) death, dying and bereavement. We are curious about young children’s views and are seeking examples from either qualitative research (grounded in humanist theories) or postqualitative approaches (grounded in posthumanist or new materialist philosophies) that trouble the still dominant developmental approaches.

This interdisciplinary issue brings together researchers and practitioners in the broad fields of education sciences, art & design, death studies, gender studies, child studies, multispecies studies and social, natural and health sciences. It represents a mixture of empirical and theoretical work gathering current qualitative and postqualitative research on the topic and imagining future directions. Representation of pedagogical and other scholarly work in the Global South is critically important. Globally, there is inequality in the extent to which death is a lived reality in children’s lives. Arguably, families growing up in poverty or conflict areas have a different relationship to death and dying than children and adults outside those circumstances. The COVID-19 pandemic has brought home the reality of death in many children’s lives, yet different levels of exposure remain. We invite authors to affirmatively and generatively engage with the literature to illuminate examples from research and pedagogical practices.

Suggested topics include, but are not limited to:

  • Children’s perspectives on death
  • More-than-human and posthuman death, dying and bereavement
  • Adult-centrism and intragenerational perspectives on death and dying
  • Death education and death in the classroom
  • Necropolitics, grievability and childhood
  • Suicide and suicidality in children
  • New openings and theoretical ideas about children and grief, sibling bereavement, parental loss, pet loss
  • Climate change and anxiety, planetary death
  • War, children’s bodies and agency
  • Children’s literature and art as methods to research children’s perspectives
  • Photography and video techniques researching child(hood), death and dying
  • Digital death: children and death in online spaces
  • Researching death with children in deathscapes, including cemeteries and dark tourism sites

 

Guest Editors:

Prof. Karin Murris
University of Oulu
Finland

Dr. Renske Visser
University of Oulu
Finland

 

Submission Guidelines/Instructions

Please refer to the Author Guidelines to prepare your manuscript. When submitting your manuscript, please answer the question: “Is this submission for a special issue?” by selecting the special issue title from the drop-down list.

The following questions might be helpful:
What types of death and dying are part of the everyday lives of young children? How do children conceptualise (multispecies) death? What methods have worked in death and dying research with young children? What creative methods have worked when decentring the human and including other/non/more-than-human death and dying? What (and how) can we learn from (and with) children about death and dying?

Submitting an abstract for this special issue: