The Challenge of Children’s Representations Seminar Series - Seminar 1

16 June 2021, 1.00 PM - 16 June 2021, 3.00 PM

This seminar series seeks to the explore the politics of children’s rights and representations. It focuses on the interplay between the claims of different actors in the field of the representations of children and their rights, including children themselves, and the basis upon which these claims are made. The seminars are based on the work of a group of academics who have been working together for the last two years to explore children’s representations in relation to the research they have been conducting in various contexts including: Ghana, India, Sweden, Belgium and within the international human rights community. For more information visit our webpage here.

Seminars chaired by: Dr. Afua Twum-Danso Imoh (Project lead) – University of Bristol (UK) 

SEMINAR 1: REGISTER FOR SEMINAR 1

Negotiating children’s rights in Sweden: National and historical origins
Speaker: Prof. Bengt Sandin – Linkoping University (Sweden)
Discussant: Therese Boje Mortensen (Lund University, Sweden)
Abstract and bio: click here

Exercising the right to education: Critical notes from India on reframing ‘participation’ in schooling
Speaker: Dr. Sarada Balagopalan – Rutgers University (USA)
Discussant: Victor Karunan (former UNICEF Senior Social Policy Specialist, SE Asia)
Abstract and bios: click here

Children’s representation in the mirror maze of transnational organisations
Speaker: Prof. Karl Hanson – University of Geneva (Switzerland)
Discussant: Patricio Cuevas-Parra (World Vision International)
Abstract and bios click here

Speakers

Bengt Sandin
Prof. @Linkoping University (Sweden)

Bengt Sandin is professor at the Department of Thematic Studies/Child Studies at the University of Linköping, Sweden. His research spans the period from the Early Modern to the late Swedish Welfare State and involve both an engagement in social and cultural history of children and the construction of childhood. Research interests include Early Modern Education and State building, Child Labour, 19th century Education, Street Children, Educational Media Politics, Welfare Politics and Abortion, the Identity of the Foetus, Construction of Children’s Rights, The History of Child Psychiatry, Children, Childhood and Reparative Justice. Bengt has been the scientific leader of a number of research programmes and has been the adviser of some 25 PhD projects. He is a fellow at CASBS, Stanford and was the president of SHCY 2011-2013. 

 
Sarada Balagopalan
Dr. @Rutgers University (USA)
 
Sarada Balagopalan is an Associate Professor of Childhood Studies at Rutgers University. Her ethnographic research focuses on postcolonial childhoods and particularly on the inequalities and indignities that mark the lives of first-generation school goers. She is the author of Inhabiting ‘Childhood’: Children, Labour and Schooling in Postcolonial India (Palgrave 2014) and co-edited Diverse Unfreedoms: The Afterlives and Transformations of Post-Transatlantic Bondages (Routledge 2020). She serves as an editor of Childhood: A Journal of Global Child Research and is an Associate Editor for The SAGE Encyclopedia of Children and Childhood Studies. She recently helped co-organize a virtual seminar series on Reimagining Childhood Studies, more information on which can be found at https://reimaginingchildhoodstudies.com.
 
 
Karl Hanson
Prof. @University of Geneva (Switzerland)
 
Karl Hanson is Professor in Public Law and Director of the Centre for Children's Rights Studies at the University of Geneva in Switzerland. His research and publications in interdisciplinary children’s rights studies deal with theorizations on children’s rights and childhood studies, working children and child labour norms and policies, children’s rights advocacy and juvenile justice. He is co-editor of the journal Childhood and chair of the Children’s Rights European Academic Network (CREAN).
Children’s Representations

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