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Booklet KReporters Workshop1

The document discusses an international workshop focused on framing critical childhood studies and decoloniality to enhance children's rights through an intersectional approach. It emphasizes the need to challenge hegemonic perspectives, recognize diverse childhood experiences, and engage in participatory practices that promote social justice. The workshop aims to explore the implications of intersectionality and decolonization in childhood studies, particularly in the context of global inequalities and the impact of neoliberalism on children's rights.

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Maria Orozco
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0% found this document useful (0 votes)
25 views7 pages

Booklet KReporters Workshop1

The document discusses an international workshop focused on framing critical childhood studies and decoloniality to enhance children's rights through an intersectional approach. It emphasizes the need to challenge hegemonic perspectives, recognize diverse childhood experiences, and engage in participatory practices that promote social justice. The workshop aims to explore the implications of intersectionality and decolonization in childhood studies, particularly in the context of global inequalities and the impact of neoliberalism on children's rights.

Uploaded by

Maria Orozco
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Framing critical childhood studies

and decoloniality to intersectionalise


children's rights
International workshop

What an intersectional approach to children’s Generative threads

rights studies entail as well as what the • Research-based knowledge on childhood


• Our understanding of childhoods expands under the lens of intersectionality
intellectual and political project of decolonising
• Ontoepistemological questions that decolonisation and intersectionality unlocks
childhood studies might mean and look like • Ethical openings of the reframing
in field research, theorising, and praxis? • Unsettling the dichotomy between the Global North and the Global South
• Decolonising our thinking, the limitation of existing theories
• Practice-based approach of doing politics for social justice
• Addressing children’s rights in neoliberal and capitalist societies
• Tactics for decolonising children’s rights in research and praxis
k

Kristina Konstantoni When intersectionality


Intersectionality is also a counter-hegemonic praxis that seeks met childhood studies:
to challenge and displace hegemonic whiteness and patriarchy.
As we continue to apply this critical theoretical approach and Thinking back and forward
praxis in childhood studies, what do we need to be mindful of?
Project play cafe’s https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/playcafe/

• Decolonising is a continuous process that interrupts colonial thinking and recentres


Critical conversations I
knowledge from the Global South

Intersectionality in critical • Creates allyship to challenge white hegemony and move beyond tokenistic inclusion
and diversity. Demands action and impact, and emphasises the need for real

childhood studies •
structural change
Engages in participatory approaches to dismantle power dynamics and promotes
Discussion: Ingvild Kvale Sørenssen collaboration. Advocates for structural changes in policy and practice to promote
Acknowledging the plurality of childhoods to avoid essentialising are key pillars in critical equity, fairness, and social justice
childhood studies. Making use of intersectional and socio-material perspectives in childhood • Reflects on the ethical implications of research and addresses internalised whiteness
studies affords theoretical, analytical and methodological tools, to think about the multiplicity of
childhoods entangled with different realities and look for children/childhood being produced in • Acknowledges the origins and histories of concepts like intersectionality, ensuring
different assemblages; and they enable to reflect on how age interacts with other categories of they are not co-opted or misused
difference, and how this might offer a resource for children’s agency and activism. • Intersectionality recognises the importance of contexts in childhood studies and the
Socio-material perspective and a relational ontology still focus on children as social actors but multiplicity of critical views
consider other actors. We can ask how children are entangled within this, and how is materialised • Mobilises knowledges from the Global South for research and practice, challenging
in different assemblages. Power and hierarchies are dependent on the spaces where relations the racialised nature of Western epistemologies
occur and situatedness. Both privilege-disadvantage depend on where and with who they
happen. • Critically questions what counts as knowledge, as research and implements
alternative assessment methods in higher education institutions (e.g. oral
By employing an intersectional and socio-material lens in critical childhood studies we can knowledges/traditions, ancestral knowledges, indigenous knowledges) and embraces
explore noticeable differences in play depending on the space, the humans, and the play continuous struggle for transformation, inspired by thinkers like bell hooks
materials. This might erase or highlight differences; what do the play materials represent or
not; do the children who play with the materials need to know how to work them; specific • Emphasises the real implications of children’s rights laws and the need for ongoing,
competences to play with specific toys; if there is a room for staff and spaces; how do the non- collective efforts to transform both policy and practice in a genuinely equitable
human actors frame the play activity? manner.
Critical perspectives to studies Afua Twum- Critical conversations II

of children’s rights in the Global


Danso Imoh Rethinking children’s
North and the Global South
rights studies
Dominant perspectives on children's rights
Discussion: Tatek Abebe
• Top-down understanding
• Implementation of objective standards Since ratification of the UNCRC, moral regulation of
• Cultural, economics, political, and social omissions children's rights along with developmental and liberal
• Governmental amendments of the legal frameworks capitalism of nations have dislocated childhoods. Then,
• Institutionalise education and NGOs programmes subversive forms of globalisation to reflect multiple
• Try to “guarantee” children’s welfare childhoods on the right of future generations are
• Elude the diversity of contexts (in the South and the North) necessary:

Limitations of the dominant perspectives • Vernacular versions of children’s rights could


provide an emic understanding of reciprocity and
• Legalist and technical approach intergenerational rights, as well as the recognition of
• Denial of poverty, family sustainability and solidarity mutuality, collective life, and the possibilities for kinship
What is lacking in this field of
• Children's rights are perceived as anti-cultural in Ghana ‘children’s rights studies’ is a formation
• Centrality of individuality in human rights principles critical perspective, an approach
• Invisibilisation of collectivist cultures and the communal that considers children’s rights
• As the dichotomy of children-as-carereceivers and
a ‘contested terrain’ with
• The imposition of the school-based education model different (conflicting) normative adults-as-caregivers decentres life experiences, rights
• Ubuntu alternative: reciprocity of social interactions between adults foundations and traditions. should be reconceptualised as the outcomes and the
and children means of relationships, where the community is the
starting point to reconceptualise what rights might
Contributions of critical perspectives mean and could look like
• Children's rights from below
• Living (everyday) rights and lifeworld approaches • Some frictions will be addressed: between children's
• Duties as central to children’s understanding of their rights perceptions and experiences around children's work;
• Work is part of what children do children's social relations and responsibilities bringing
• A wider approach to education cyclical and intergenerational visions; and questioning
• Reciprocity shapes social relations the ontological reasons that separate the rights of
• Inherent reciprocity based on concrete fair value children and ones of other citizens.
• Intergenerational contract
• Civic responsibility
Critical conversations III Worlding worlds with children
Decoloniality in education in extractivist colonial times

I. Southern childhood studies: researching children’s lives from


the epistemologies of the South. A rights-based and development
approach primary rely on the state's protection of children and
childhood in racialised capitalist societies. When rupturing the
romanticised child in the Global North that emphasises the "saving"
vulnerable childhoods in the Global South, we reconceptualise
Discussion: Montserrat Rifà-Valls children/childhoods as being negotiated and subjected to the
multiple temporalities and relationalities. Here Andean-child-land
I. From new materialist and decolonial childhood studies,
relations require the research attention.

Verónica
we get entangled with a posthumanist vision of children
in symbiosis where 'being is the space-time-mattering' to
II. Materialist anticolonial analysis of extractivist capitalism.
reflect on "how childhood is generated within the political

Pacini-Ketchabaw
Beyond biopolitics, geontopower overcomes the dycothomy between
and ethical contexts" [*Veronica’s words].
life and non-life. Due to geology stablishes the norms for materiality
II. Co-creating narratives for the insurgent earth follows up we ask how the practices of extraction and racial subjugation create
How to address children's rights in the question "what do we compose with".* Aligned to this, "geotrauma" and dispossession by reproducing a colonial earth's
the context of the devastation of the some artists like Ursula Biemann explore ethnographically destruction of worlds and life forms. Insurgent geologies of subaltern
Capitalocene in the Global South? How
how people embody and resist the extractivist (mine) children provide for a black onto-aesthetic grammar that transforms
can we think about childhood at a time
when children are witnessing violent capitalist landscapes as zones of conflict. Theoretically, oppressive geologic regimes.
extractions in their own territories? geontopower, governmentality, necropolitics and
What to do when the proliferation of
cosmopolitics are significant in chilhood studies knowledge III. Creating anticolonial narratives with children. The arts
extractive activities and the violent
forces of global capital increasingly production to think and transform the ways we inhabit the explore how politics might be practiced through multisensoriality
challenge children's rights agendas? earth while constructing an “emergent common account” to produce anti-colonial gestures of imperial narratives in Ecuador.
(Stengers 2005). The anticolonial research maps the conditions of decolonisation, and
simultaneously, can contribute to create "materialist pedagogies of
III. In the end, weaving research as an anticolonial praxis anticolonial praxis" or the pedagogies of life-making:
aims to decolonise disciplinary knowledge, approach
children’s lives from the “unknow”, and use multisensorial "This life-making is profoundly inventive and far from
feminist methods. Worlding worlds in life-making predetermined. We do life through the mundane, everyday
pedagogies works against current violences perpetuated by gestures of co-composing through rituals, encounters,
imperial capitalistic power relations. exposures, working at dissensus, interrupting hegemony
and normativity, working through rather than intervening in
problems."
DIFFRACTION Discussion
Diffraction emphasises producing difference, reading one
theory through another. Science Friction: political tensions
arise from frictioning, knowledge production as decentring Arts-based diffraction made possible

ASSEMBLAGES
process.
to think on:
Assemblages as ontological, cultural and materials
associations piece together the plurality of childhoods, • Space utilisation: Understanding and

WHO ARE WE?


research assemblage methods and researchers’ bodies. experimenting with space to enhance
Who is we? This polyphony and plurality [as a result of conversations and collaborations
encompassing all human and more-than-human] creates the

COALESCENCE
relations and interactions essential for building resilient and • Interdisciplinary reading: Finding ways
inclusive societies. to read through, rather than against,
Coalescence. Multiplicity and coexistence bring together different disciplines in childhood studies

UNLEARNING
separate entities to create new forms without homogenizing
them, understanding "we" through active processes and • Travelling concepts: Exploring how
frictions.
concepts move in, through, and out of

THE FUNAMBULIST
Unlearning. Decolonisation means unlearning, be aware of childhood studies
racialisation and pushes us outside the comfort zones in
pedagogy and art (Carrie Mae Weems and Lorna Simpson as • Methodological approaches: Rethinking
examples).
tools and methodologies based on re-

SCALING
The Funambulist is a platform engaging with the politics
of space and bodies. Is also a metaphor for our research
assembling (re-attachment)
identities. • Construct of children: Situating and
Scaling inspired by Anna L. Tsing (2004) refers to reading different experiences of
interconnections, collaborative relationships and magnitudes.
[Watch the documentary Powers of Ten 1977]. childhood across localities

Participatory creative • Addressing assemblages of oppression


(Nancy Fraser) and the political positions
assemblages I of terms
• Reflecting on care and childhood
within intersectional and assemblage
frameworks
• Viewing intersectionality as a process
that relates to the world and traces
Cartographying journeys to understand agency and
intersectional responses
• Conceptualising the intersection of
childhood studies different factors and their impacts on
and children’s childhood studies.

onto-politics
Engaging with local contexts: Discussion

Towards an anti-colonial research and praxis • Emerging intersectionality from the


territory: Addressing the matrix of
inequality locally, while considering global
capitalist, colonialist, and patriarchal
influences; and situating intersectionality
in local realities to understand inequalities
more deeply, to provide a nuanced
understanding of inequalities, childhood
resistance, and community well-being
• Intersectional and decolonial turns:
Reflecting on the whitening and
depoliticisation of intersectionality and
decoloniality from a critical view to avoid
homogenising childhood and its discourses,
and facilitating fluid dialogue between them
by enhancing the political radicalism of the
anticolonial and “descolonial” approaches
(Mara Viveros and Gloria Anzaldúa)
• Territories in conflict/post-conflict:
Children embody and inherit conflicts not
only in the Global South but also in the
Global North, where systemic violence
and conflict take various forms. Counter-
topographies trace nodes of violence and
conflict that share systemic bases and the
dispossession of children's rights, as well as
the local resistances.

Participatory creative
assemblages II
References
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Konstantoni, K. & Emejulu, A. (2017). When intersectionality met childhood studies: the dilemmas of a
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Twum-Danso Imoh, A. (2023). Adults in charge: the limits of formal child participatory process for societal
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K Reporters research team:
Tatek Abebe, Ingrid Agud, Amina A. Ally, Marta Bertran, Mijntje D.C. ten
Brummelaar, Spelca Budal, Mireia Foradada, Estrella Moya González,
Anna Majó, Virginie Poujol, Montserrat Rifà-Valls, Mónica M. Romero,
Angelina Sánchez, Laura Segarra and Ingvild Kvale Sørenssen.
K Reporters: 101131090 2024 June 5-7th, Trondheim (Norway). This work is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0

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