John Wall

John Wall is an American educator and theoretical ethicist who teaches at Rutgers University Camden. He is director of the Childism Institute and co-director of the Children's Voting Colloquium.

Research Wall's research focuses on "the groundworks of moral life, particularly their relations to language, power, and childhood" and theoretical work where he argues that "ethical life is fundamentally creative", as well as for his concept of childism, or the empowerment of children by transforming norms.

Career Wall was born in 1965 in Leeds, United Kingdom and moved to the United States as a teenager. He obtained a BA, MA, and Ph.D. from the University of Chicago and taught for one year at DePaul University before taking up a permanent position at Rutgers University.

At Rutgers University, Wall teaches in the departments of philosophy, religion, and childhood studies. He is the founding director of the Childism Institute and is the co-founder of the Children’s Voting Colloquium. In 2006, Wall assisted in the creation of a childhood studies doctoral program at Rutgers. Marriage, Health, and the Professions (2002, co-editor, Eerdmans) Moral Creativity: Paul Ricoeur and the Poetics of Possibility (2005, Oxford University Press) Ethics in Light of Childhood (2010, Georgetown University Press) Children and Armed Conflict (2011, co-editor, Palgrave Macmillan) Children’s Rights: Today’s Global Challenge (2017, Rowman & Littlefield) Give Children the Vote: On Democratizing Democracy (2022, Bloomsbury Academic) Exploring Children's Suffrage: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Ageless Voting (2022, editor, Palgrave Macmillan) The Bloomsbury Handbook of Theories in Childhood Studies (2023, co-editor, Bloomsbury Academic)

Journal articles

Wall, John (2014). “Democratizing Democracy: The Road from Women’s to Children’s Suffrage”. International Journal of Human Rights, Special Issue, edited by Sonja Grover (2014) 18.6: 646–659.

Wall, John (2019). “Theorizing Children’s Global Citizenship: Reconstructionism and the Politics of Deep Interdependence”. Global Studies of Childhood (March 2019) 9(1):5-17. Wall, John and Jonathan Josefsson (2020). “Empowered Inclusion: Theorizing Global Justice for Children and Youth”. Globalizations, 2020:1-19. DOI: 10.1080/14747731.2020.1736853.