Young People’s Participation


Book Description

Young people’s participation is an urgent policy and practice concern across countries and context. This book showcases original research evidence and analysis to consider how, under what conditions and for what purposes young people participate in different parts of Europe. Focusing on the interplay between the concepts of youth, inequality and participation, this book explores how structural changes, including economic austerity, neoliberal policies and new patterns of migration, affect the conditions of young people’s participation and its aims. With contributions from a range of subject experts, including young people themselves, the book challenges current policies and practices on young people’s participation. It asks how young people can be better supported to take part in social change and decision-making and what can be learnt from young people’s own initiatives.




The Child's Right to Development


Book Description

A comprehensive analysis and innovative, holistic interpretation of the child's right to development.




Children’s Rights and the Capability Approach


Book Description

This volume addresses the conditions allowing the transformation of specific children’s rights into capabilities in settings as different as children’s parliaments, organized leisure activities, contexts of vulnerability, children in care. It addresses theoretical questions linked to children’s agency and reflexivity, education, the life cycle perspective, child participation, evolving capabilities and citizenship. The volume highlights important issues that have to be taken into account for the implementation of human rights and the development of peoples’ capabilities. The focus on children’s capabilities along a rights-based approach is an inspiring perspective that researchers and practitioners in the field of human rights would like to deepen.




The Bloomsbury Handbook of Theories in Childhood Studies


Book Description

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Theories in Childhood Studies brings together an international group of childhood studies scholars who work with a range of critical theories. It speaks to both scholars and students by addressing questions such as how childhoods are diversely constructed and how children's experiences can be better understood. The volume draws together a diversity of theoretical perspectives from the social sciences and humanities such as critical race studies, disability studies, posthumanism, feminism, politics, decolonialism, queer theory and postcolonialism to generate a much-needed conversation about how to move childhood studies forward as a grounded field of research. The volume is subdivided into three sections - subjectivities, relationalities, and structures - each of which addresses different but interrelated approaches to childhood studies theorization. This handbook will be an essential text not just for childhood studies researchers, but for all those interested in theorizing what childhood is, what work it does and who children are.




Parenting Matters


Book Description

Decades of research have demonstrated that the parent-child dyad and the environment of the familyâ€"which includes all primary caregiversâ€"are at the foundation of children's well- being and healthy development. From birth, children are learning and rely on parents and the other caregivers in their lives to protect and care for them. The impact of parents may never be greater than during the earliest years of life, when a child's brain is rapidly developing and when nearly all of her or his experiences are created and shaped by parents and the family environment. Parents help children build and refine their knowledge and skills, charting a trajectory for their health and well-being during childhood and beyond. The experience of parenting also impacts parents themselves. For instance, parenting can enrich and give focus to parents' lives; generate stress or calm; and create any number of emotions, including feelings of happiness, sadness, fulfillment, and anger. Parenting of young children today takes place in the context of significant ongoing developments. These include: a rapidly growing body of science on early childhood, increases in funding for programs and services for families, changing demographics of the U.S. population, and greater diversity of family structure. Additionally, parenting is increasingly being shaped by technology and increased access to information about parenting. Parenting Matters identifies parenting knowledge, attitudes, and practices associated with positive developmental outcomes in children ages 0-8; universal/preventive and targeted strategies used in a variety of settings that have been effective with parents of young children and that support the identified knowledge, attitudes, and practices; and barriers to and facilitators for parents' use of practices that lead to healthy child outcomes as well as their participation in effective programs and services. This report makes recommendations directed at an array of stakeholders, for promoting the wide-scale adoption of effective programs and services for parents and on areas that warrant further research to inform policy and practice. It is meant to serve as a roadmap for the future of parenting policy, research, and practice in the United States.




Children’s Rights, Educational Research and the UNCRC


Book Description

‘Children’s Rights, Educational Research, and the UNCRC’ provides international perspectives on contemporary issues pertaining to children’s rights in education. The global context, relevance and implications of children’s rights, educational research and the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) are explored from multiple perspectives. Since the development of the UNCRC over 25 years ago, significant changes have occurred in the way that children’s rights are considered, conceptualised and enacted. Even so, there remains a continued debate surrounding the extent to which the children’s rights agenda is embraced within education, as researchers, teachers and other educational professionals continue to consider the degree to which the UNCRC informs practice. This book provides critical and focused discussion on the challenges of enacting children’s rights in educational research contexts and alerts readers to the ways in which children’s rights provide a provocation to think and practise differently. Chapter contributions from scholars in Australia, Finland, Portugal, Sweden and the United Kingdom provide diverse contexts from which subsequent educational and research practice can be derived. Each chapter problematises different aspects of children’s rights within the context of educational research with both broad and specific wide-ranging implications and provides examples of different ways that these aspects are considered in practice.




Lived Citizenship on the Edge of Society


Book Description

This edited collection presents the concept of lived citizenship as a fruitful avenue for exploring the role played by social work practices in the lives of people in vulnerable positions. The book centres on the everyday experiences through which people practice, negotiate, understand and feel their citizenship. The authors offer both empirical analyses of how social work influences the rights, obligations, identities and belongings of children, homeless people, migrants, ethnic minorities, and young people with mental disabilities; and a theoretical framework for analysing the complexities of social work. Drawing on the notion of intimate citizenship and an understanding of citizenship as socio-spatial, the theoretical framework addresses the challenges of enhancing the agency of social work clients and of promoting inclusive citizenship, and how these challenges are shaped by emotions, affect, rationality, materiality, power relations, policies and managerial strategies. Lived Citizenship on the Edge of Society will be of interest to students and scholars across a range of disciplines including social policy and social work.




Child Protection in Development


Book Description

Every day millions of children in developing countries face adversities of many kinds, yet there is a shortage of sound evidence concerning their plight and an urgent need to identify the most appropriate and effective policy responses from among the multiple approaches that exist. This collection of journal papers aims to engage with researchers and debates in the field so as to understand better some of the numerous risks confronted by children in developing countries. It highlights the complexity of protecting children in various forms of adversity, challenges conventional wisdom about what protects children, demonstrates why it is essential to consult with children to protect them successfully, and suggests that successful protection must be based on strong empirical understanding of the situation and the perspectives of children and communities involved. The contributors are all experienced researchers and practitioners who have worked for many years with children in developing countries. The book offers suggestions for reform of current child protection policies, based on empirical findings around a range of child protection concerns, including children’s work, independent migration, family separation, early marriage, and military occupation. Together, the contributions provide a body of knowledge important to humanitarian and development policy and practice. This book was published as a special issue of Development in Practice.




Children, Young People and Borders


Book Description

This edited volume increases knowledge about children and young people living in borderlands, passing through borders and (de)constructing borders, as well as highlights the potential of studying how children and young people imagine, act, cross, and inhabit symbolic and material borders. The study of borders and borderlands is growing extensively, but the experiences of children and young people in the turmoil of border changes and border crossings remain under-researched. Adopting a multidisciplinary approach, this edited volume has a twofold objective: to increase knowledge about children and young people living in borderlands, passing through borders and (de)constructing borders; and to highlight the potential of studying how children and young people imagine, act, cross, and inhabit symbolic and material borders, with the aim of advancing the theoretical and empirical debate within border studies. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Borderlands Studies.