The Politics of Children’s Rights and Representation

This edited volume investigates children and youth's deep entanglement in today's major global, national, and local transformations and processes: wherein they are not mere spectators and objects of transformations but instead actively shape them through various social, economic, and political representations. International contributions illuminate the problems that arise when children's rights and participation become a site of contestation and power over who represents whom, what, when, and where. The authors do not provide simple solutions, instead offering an understanding of the fundamental nature of these problems as founded in the application of rights and the nature of representation in modern society. Together, the authors emphasize that child representation must take into account the local and spatial context of how representations of children are discussed, as well as possible discrepancies between local, regional, national, and global processes. Bengt Sandin is Professor Emeritus of Child Studies in the Department of Thematic Studies at Linköping University, Sweden. His previous publications include Schooling and State Formation in Early Modern Sweden (2020). Jonathan Josefsson is Assistant Professor of Child Studies in the Department of Thematic Studies at Linköping University, Sweden. His previous publications include Children at the Borders (2016) and Empowered Inclusion: Theorizing Global Justice for Children and Youth (2020). Karl Hanson is Professor of Public Law and Director of the Centre for Children's Rights Studies at the University of Geneva, Switzerland. His previous publications include Reconceptualizing Children’s Rights In International Development: Living Rights, Social Justice, Translations (2013). He is an editor of Childhood. Sarada Balagopalan is Associate Professor of Childhood Studies at Rutgers University-Camden, USA. Her previous publications include Inhabiting ‘Childhood’: Children, Labour and Schooling in Postcolonial India (2014). .

Introduction: Representing children -- Chapter 1. Recognizing children’s rights: From child protection to children’s human rights - the 1979 Swedish ban on corporal punishment in perspective -- Chapter 2. Adults in charge: The limits of formal child participatory processes for societal transformation -- Chapter 3. Children’s participation in their right to education: Learning from the Delhi High Court Cases, 1997-2001 -- Chapter 4. Representing the child before the court -- Chapter 5. Could it be that they do not want to hear what we have to say?’ organised working children and the international politics and representations of child labour -- Chapter 6. Children without childhood: Representations of the child-soldier as an international emergency -- Chapter 7. Children’s representation in the transnational mirror maze -- Chapter 8. Combatting child poverty in the childhood moratorium: A representational lens on children’s rights -- Chapter 9. Deliberative disobedience as a strategy for claiming rights and representation in the family: the case of Accra’s street children -- Chapter 10. Child Figurations in youth climate justice activism: The Visual rhetoric of the Fridays for Future on Instagram -- Chapter 11. Political strategies of self-representation: The case of young Afghan migrants in Sweden -- Chapter 12. Political representation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander youth in Australia. .