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Critical Children’s Rights Studies: A Research Companion

Critical Children’s Rights Studies: A Research Companion

Author: Valeria Llobet; Didier Reynaert; Afua Twum-Danso Imoh; Wouter Vandenhole
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 9781032827612
Published In: July 2025
Format: Hardback
Jurisdiction: U.K. ? Disclaimer:
Countri(es) stated herein are used as reference only

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Description
Contents

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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 providing alternative pathways to conceptualising 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.

Critical Children’s Rights Studies: an introduction

Didier Reynaert, Wouter Vandenhole, Afua Twum-Danso Imoh & Valeria Llobet

1. Am I a critical children’s rights researcher? A reflexive analysis of the adaptive model of childhood

Nico Brando

2. Children’s liberation: a critical return to the radical work of Shulamith Firestone

Edward van Daalen

3. Children's rights as counter-rights: how the paternalism of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child can be countered

Manfred Liebel

4. Children’s search for equality: between the legal and the political

Lucia Rabello de Castro

5. Children’s rights from a childist perspective: theorizing social empowerment

John Wall

6. Children’s rights and the future

Karl Hanson

7. Recasting children’s rights as relational, circular, and interdependent

Tatek Abebe

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

Afua Twum-Danso Imoh

9. Those afraid of gender and childhood: anti-gender attacks against Judith Butler in Brazil

Luan Carpes Barros Cassal & Erica Burman

10.Child, early and forced marriage from a critical children’s rights perspective

Wouter Vandenhole & Yitaktu Tibebu

11. Child rights regimes and the political economy of children and childhood: a historical perspective of time in interpreting social change

Bengt Sandin

12. The hidden histories of children’s rights

Basia Vucic

13. Historicizing rights subjectivities in post-colonial contexts: the right to education and the deregulation of child labour in India

Sarada Balagopalan

14. The social construction of children’s rights: origins of, and developments in, the

children’s rights movement in Flanders

Didier Reynaert

15. Strategic uses and redefinitions of children's rights: violence against children in Argentina and Brazil

Valeria Llobet, Fernanda Bittencourt Ribeiro & Carla Villalta

16. Beyond implementation: a critical children’s rights-based approach to the experiences of neurodiverse justice-involved youth

Daniella Bendo, Dustin Ciufo & Christina Goodwin-De Faria

17. A critical perspective on children’s right to play

Anandini Dar

18. Children’s rights implementation as a lived practice: an ethnography of implementation in India and its potential for critical children’s rights studies

Therese Boje Mortensen

19. Critique after inclusion: three pathways towards a critical study of children’s rights

Jonathan Josefsson

Conclusion

Afua Twum-Danso Imoh, Valeria Llobet, Didier Reynaert & Wouter Vandenhole