Scholarly work on children’s rights is in a critical phase. Across disciplines and continents, scholars are questioning the normative assumptions that have long underpinned both research and practice—assumptions deeply shaped by Western and legal-positivist frameworks. The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC), despite its immense and transformative significance, has also functioned as a framework that reinforces a particular understanding of childhood, rights, and justice, often at the expense of Indigenous, community-based, and Global South epistemologies.

Concepts such as Ubuntu, buen vivir, and relational perceptions of childhood remind us that children's rights are not culturally neutral — they travel, they translate, and in that translation, something is always at stake. Colonial histories have left lasting marks on the ways societies understand, govern, educate, and protect children, frequently imposing Western models of individualised childhood and formal rights, which disrupt Indigenous and communal ways of raising children (e.g., Abebe et al., 2022; Collins et al., 2021; Faulkner & Nyamutata, 2020; Hoem et al., 2026; Rizzini, 2025; Rizzini et al., 2023; Rizzini et al., 2025; Ursin & Lyså, 2024). These legacies persist in modern children's rights discourses, where dominant norms may overshadow or invalidate local practices and epistemologies, constituting a form of epistemic injustice, thus narrowing our understanding of what children's rights can and should mean.

A genuinely decolonial and critical approach to children's rights must therefore attend not only to the content of rights frameworks, but also to the conditions under which knowledge encompassing those rights is produced, validated, and circulated. This conference aims to move beyond critique. While a critical examination of the UNCRC's normative assumptions, Eurocentric foundations, and implementation gaps is necessary, critique alone is not the goal. Drawing on decolonial approaches to human rights—and in particular Barreto’s (2018) tripartite movement of critical stance, retrieval, and dialogue, we invite contributions that reach further: that retrieve knowledge and concepts evolved in the colonised world; that bring Indigenous ontologies, community-based philosophies, and Global South epistemologies into genuine conversation with codified rights frameworks, imagining how rights might be re-imagined, re-grounded, and re-enlivened. As Freeman (2009) reminds us, it is ‘too easy to assume that the Convention itself represents the final word on children's rights’ (p. 383). Children's rights are better understood as a dynamic and open process. This conference seeks alternative pathways to understanding and enacting children's rights, beyond the UNCRC as the sole normative horizon.

The conference also invites contributions that move beyond the epistemological and ontological to the practical. Decolonising children's rights is also a question of what we do differently: how we design research, organise services, shape curricula, facilitate participation, and build partnerships across communities and institutions. We therefore welcome contributions from practitioners, community organisations, educators, and policymakers, who experiment with critical, decolonial, or otherwise innovative approaches to working with and for children's rights. The conference values this knowledge as indispensable to the project of transformation.

References:

Abebe, T., Dar, A., & Lyså, I. M. (2022). Southern theories and decolonial childhood studies. Childhood, 29(3), 255–275. https://doi.org/10.1177/09075682221111690

Barreto, J.-M. (2018). Decolonial thinking and the quest for decolonising human rights. Asian Journal of Social Science, 46(4/5), 484–502.

Collins, T. M., Rizzini, I., & Mayhew, A. (2021). Fostering global dialogue: Conceptualisations of children's rights to participation and protection. Children & Society, 35(2), 295–310.

Faulkner, E. A., & Nyamutata, C. (2020). The decolonisation of children's rights and the colonial contours of the Convention on the Rights of the Child. The International Journal of Children's Rights, 28(1), 66–88. https://doi.org/10.1163/15718182-02801009

Freeman, M. (2009). Children's rights as human rights: Reading the UNCRC. In W. A. Corsaro, M.-S. Honig, & J. Qvortrup (Eds.), The Palgrave handbook of childhood studies (pp. 377–393). Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-230-27468-6_26

Hoem, I. B., Ursin, M., Serwajja, E., & Lyså, I. M. (2026). Children's rights through Baganda's Obuntubulamu: A decolonial exercise of imagining human rights otherwise. The International Journal of Children's Rights, 1(aop), 1–35.

Rizzini, I., Corona, R. F., Collins, T. M., Krishnamurthy, S., & Neumann, M. M. (2023). Perspectivas internacionais sobre decolonialidade e direitos da criança. O Social em Questão, 2(56).

Rizzini, I. (2025a). Decoloniality: Personal perspectives. Canadian Journal of Children's Rights/Revue canadienne des droits des enfants, 12(1), 229–233.

Rizzini, I., Collins, T., Strickland, D., & Neumann, M. M. (2025b). Introduction to special issue: Children's rights and decolonial perspectives: Challenging dominant modes of knowledge production. Canadian Journal of Children's Rights/Revue canadienne des droits des enfants, 12(1), i–vii.

Ursin, M., & Lyså, I. M. (2024). "Not everyone can become a rocket scientist": Decolonising children's rights in ethnic minority childhoods in Norway. Social Sciences, 13(2), 117.

This conference invites children and youths, scholars, practitioners, students, and policymakers to engage in critical, cross-cultural, and decolonial dialogues on children's rights. We ask how children's rights frameworks travel across cultural, political, and socio-legal contexts. We examine how they are shaped by unequal geopolitical relations and colonial legacies. And we inquire how they may be transformed to better reflect the lived childhoods of children across the globe, including children living with the intersecting crises of climate injustice, racial discrimination, war and conflict, poverty, and social exclusion.

We welcome contributions from a wide range of disciplines — law, sociology, anthropology, education, social work, childhood studies, and beyond — and particularly encourage participation from children and youth, students, scholars, and policy-makers from the Global South.

Contributions may address, but are not limited to, the following questions:

Decolonising rights - What does it mean to decolonise children's rights? How do colonial and neocolonial legacies shape children's rights discourses locally and globally? What alternative normative foundations—including Indigenous philosophies, communal ethics, and Global South legal traditions—can be utilised to enrich dominant frameworks?

Rights in translation - How do children’s rights frameworks travel across cultural, political, and socio-legal contexts? What is gained and what is lost in translation? How do children, communities, and practitioners interpret, adapt, and contest rights in their specific situations?

Epistemic justice - Whose knowledge counts in children's rights research and practice? How can non-Western, Indigenous and community-based knowledges be centred in international debates?

Equality, intersectionality, and structural critique - How do colonial, racialised, classed, gendered and generational hierarchies shape access to rights and the conditions of childhood? How can a critical orientation to equality address not only legal rights but also substantive inequalities?

Global challenges and children’s everyday lives - How do intersecting global crises — climate change, migration, conflict, poverty, democratic erosion—shape children's rights claims and lived experiences? What does rights-based analysis contribute to understanding and responding to these crises?

Enacting Rights Otherwise - What practices in enhancing children’s rights have been developed, tested, and contested? What has failed, and what has been learned?

Positionality and reflexivity in research - How do researchers’ own backgrounds, disciplines, and geographic locations shape the questions they ask and the answers they produce? What does it mean to do critical, decolonial children's rights research in practice?

Methodology and pedagogy - What research methods, pedagogical approaches, and teaching practices support critical and decolonial knowledge production? How can cross-cultural, intergenerational, and community-based collaborations generate new forms of knowledge?

The conference aims to make space for a range of voices, methods, and modes of engagement, moving beyond conventional academic papers to include practice-based, creative, and participatory contributions. Ways to participate include, but are not limited to, the following formats (depending on the interests and aspirations of the conference participants):

Individual papers - Presentations of 20 minutes on any theme relevant to the conference. Please submit a 300-word abstract and a short biography.

Panels - Thematically coherent groups of 3–4 papers with a chair and discussant. Panel organisers should submit a 200-word panel rationale alongside individual abstracts.

Practice-based and policy contributions - Contributions from practitioners, NGOs, or policymakers reflecting on the translation of children's rights in specific organisational or policy contexts. Please submit a 300-word abstract and a short biography of the organisation.

Posters - Especially welcome from MA and PhD candidates. Please submit a 200-word abstract and a draft poster outline.

Intergenerational dialogue circles - Children and young people participate alongside scholars and practitioners in moderated dialogues exploring lived experiences of rights, climate justice, discrimination, or activism. This format centres lived experience and deliberately reduces hierarchical divides between generations.

Photo-voice exhibition — “What Adults Don’t See” - Partner organisations invite young people to produce photo-essays reflecting on topics of interest (for instance, safety, rights, belonging, inequality, or visions of the future). Their work forms a conference exhibition, and youth may co-present findings.

Art & Activism Lab - A creative space for students, artists, activists, and practitioners to co-create visual art or posters at the intersection of children's rights and social justice. Outputs may be displayed and/or published.

Decolonising Our Practices workshop - Small facilitated groups reflecting critically on positionality, research ethics, curriculum design, power dynamics, and mobility asymmetries in the field. Please submit a 200-word workshop rationale.

Child Rights Case Lab - Collaborative reanalysis of specific rights questions through local knowledges and cultural frameworks, supporting alternative and context-sensitive understandings of children's rights in practice. Please submit a 200-word case rationale.