Full Description
The field of children's rights studies is well established and largely dominated by a top-down approach that considers these rights as objective standards requiring implementation in practice or policy. This book argues for a critical perspective which views the area as contested terrain with conflicting normative foundations and traditions. The collection brings together established and rising scholars whose work has been central to not only challenging mainstream children's rights discourses but also provides alternative pathways to conceptualizing children's rights. It moves beyond critiques of these dominant discourses and sets out the emerging paradigm of Critical Children's Rights Studies drawing on contexts in both the Global North and Global South. It proposes new pathways and subjects these to scrutiny, illuminating the importance of contextual situatedness and acknowledging the need to consider researchers' own positionality when outlining their stance on children's rights.
Containing both empirical and theoretical scholarship, the book will be an essential resource for students, academics, researchers and policy-makers working in the multidisciplinary areas of childhood studies, children's rights studies and international human rights.
The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.
Contents
Critical Children's Rights Studies: an introduction 1. Am I a critical children's rights researcher? A reflexive analysis of the adaptive model of childhood 2. Children's liberation: a critical return to the radical work of Shulamith Firestone 3. Children's rights as counter-rights: how the paternalism of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child can be countered 4. Children's search for equality: between the legal and the political 5. Children's rights from a childist perspective: theorizing social empowerment 6. Children's rights and the future 7. Recasting children's rights as relational, circular, and interdependent 8. Destabilizing images of the competent adult vs. the incompetent child in dominant children's rights discourses through the lens of Akan notions of personhood and social relations 9. Those afraid of gender and childhood: anti-gender attacks against Judith Butler in Brazil 10.Child, early and forced marriage from a critical children's rights perspective 11. Child rights regimes and the political economy of children and childhood: a historical perspective of time in interpreting social change 12. The hidden histories of children's rights 13. Historicizing rights subjectivities in post-colonial contexts: the right to education and the deregulation of child labour in India 14. The social construction of children's rights: origins of, and developments in, the children's rights movement in Flanders 15. Strategic uses and redefinitions of children's rights: violence against children in Argentina and Brazil 16. Beyond implementation: a critical children's rights-based approach to the experiences of neurodiverse justice-involved youth 17. A critical perspective on children's right to play 18. Children's rights implementation as a lived practice: an ethnography of implementation in India and its potential for critical children's rights studies 19. Critique after inclusion: three pathways towards a critical study of children's rights Conclusion
