The concept of adultcentrism in history: interdisciplinary dialogues

Abstract

The focus of this article is to present the concept of adultcentrism as fundamental to the creation of a historical approach to children and teenagers. A concept that emerged in the sociology of childhood, adultcentrism is based on the idea that society in its various dimensions is organized around the figure of the adult. The adult-centric perspective has been a "present/absent" in child-adolescent historiography. The proposal is to offer possible conceptualizations about the adultcentrism theme, which deal with the various dimensions it has, as a social and historical phenomenon. Based on these explanations, the expectation is to identify, in the most relevant historiographic production about childhoods, the way in which perceptions about children and adolescents were built. The final proposal is to offer the notion of citizen agency of children and adolescents as an adequate interpretive key to counteract the dominant adultcentrism paradigm.