Frédéric Darbellay & Karl Hanson , IUKB

Three strategic questions in children’s rights research

Why and how can children’s rights be considered as an inter- and transdisciplinary field of research?

Which disciplines can contribute to understand the field’s complexity? How do these disciplines interact?

What role can the concept of “implementation” and its methods and practices play for analysing and understanding the complexity of children’s rights?

Children’s rights

a) An emerging, complex and multidimensional academic field of teaching and research

b) Multiple fields (education, institutions, culture, media, politics, health care, etc.) and stakeholders (children, families, educators, NGOs, States, Intergovernmental organisations, etc.)

c) Several disciplines studying children and childhood : interaction, dialogue and integration of disciplines in an inter- and transdisciplinary perspective.

Children’s rights as an inter- and transdisciplinary process

Discipline N + 7 […]

Legal studies

History

Anthropology

Sociology

Psychology

Children’s Children’s rightsrights

From implementation to translations

Implementation: concept which expresses a single, one way direction.

Translation(s): concept which embraces a continuous process taking place both between and within the local and the international levels. Implementation in action as a co-productive, non-linear, non-hierarchical and reverse process of translation.

A new integration of theories, methods and practices of teaching and research across and beyond scientific disciplines and paradigms in order to describe, analyze and understand the complexity of theoretical and practical questions in children’s rights.

Living rights/Translations research project

International children’s rights have primarily been approached and studied as forming part of a top-down process, whereby principles and rights enshrined in international human rights documents need to be implemented at the national and local levels. Within this view, the ultimate aim of human rights implementation is for international norms to have an impact on the ground, in children’s real lives

Implementation is here considered as the translation of international norms into practice, from top to bottom.

Internationalchildren’s rights

Internationalchildren’s rights

Children’s lived realitiesLiving rights

ParticipationImplementation

Children’s lived realitiesLiving rights

Implementation – participation

Translation processes

Our ongoing interdisciplinary research project, Living Rights/Translations, inverts this perspective. The project adopts a bottom up approach to children’s rights by starting with children’s own conceptualisations of their rights, i.e. their living rights, described as how children themselves define and make use of what they consider being their important human rights.Rather than relying on the implementation concept which expresses a single, one way direction, we put forward the concept translations which embraces a continuous process taking place both between and within the local and the international levels. It is within this understanding of translation processes as dynamic, circular and continuous practices that the project will explore space for taking into account children’s living rights.

Internationalchildren’s rights

Translation processes

Children’s lived realitiesLiving rights

Translation processes

Translations: an interdisciplinary concept

The concept translations relies on interdisciplinary concepts of complexity, circularity and interrelations and is a central component of our theory-developing in the children’s rights field.

The translations concept has a strong potential to serve as a rallying concept for encouraging an interdisciplinary dialogue amongst socio-legal studies, communication sciences, human geography, social anthropology, sociology, psychology and political sciences, which are perspectives that all will be engaged with during the research project.

Instead of implementation, we propose the concept translation as a co-productive, non-linear, non-hierarchical and reverse process, which involves a new integration of theories, methods and practices of teaching and research across and beyond scientific disciplines and paradigms in order to describe, analyze and understand the complexity of theoretical and practical questions in children’s rights.

Translation processes

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