https://openaccess.city.ac.uk/id/eprint/22861/4/WF%20manuscript%20-%20Mills%20%26%20LeFrancois%20July%2017-2.pdfChild As Metaphor: Colonialism, PsyGovernance, and Epistemicide. World Futures, 74(7-8), pp. 503-524, Mills, C. and Lefrancois, B. A. (2018)
"Throughout this article we have demonstrated the ways in which child as metaphor functions to denigrate colonized, psychiatrized and/or intellectually disabled people, as it reproduces these groups and actual children as being irrational, incompetent, unintelligent, animistic, in need of (parental) guidance, (economically) unproductive, and epistemically void.
The use of this metaphor, as we have seen, performs important political agendas inherent to the colonial project, racism, epistemicide, the medicalization of madness and disability, and the subjugating notions of development that unpins each.
All this is accomplished by focusing on and imposing a pejorative Western understanding of childhood that may be neither consistent with Indigenous/non-Western understandings of what constitutes childhood nor consistent with actual children’s abilities.
Regardless, the material and discursive impact on children has been demonstrated to include multi-systemic oppression including the interplay of adultism, colonialism, racism, sanism and dis/ableism, which mutually constitute and complicate each other. This interplay takes place at the level of adult-child relations and the psy governance of childhood itself, within global North-South-Fourth World relations and the racist infantilisation-parentification constructed within them, as well as within sane-mad relations and ableist-‘crip' relations, including the psy and medical domination that governs both.
A transdisciplinary approach has enabled the deconstruction of the co-constitutive metaphors of mad, ‘crip’, child, and colony/savage. This has made visible how the psy-disciplines have been constituted through colonialism and so are always already a colonial practice, and how the psy-disciplines and colonialism (even when seemingly operating apart from one another) use similar tools which are built upon the interlacing metaphors of madness, disability, savagery, and childhood."
