The global as a field: children's rights advocacy as a transnational practice

Research on transnationalism has called into question the much criticized but persistent dichotomy between the nation-state space as an ‘inside’, and the global realm as its constitutive ‘outside’. This paper contributes to the emerging scholarship on transnational elites working at the intersection of the national and the global by assessing practices related to children's rights advocacy. Particular attention is paid to the drafting and the enforcement of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child since the 1980s. Based on Bourdieuan theorization of social fields the paper argues that some aspects in the children's rights advocacy can only be understood as reflecting the dynamism of the transnational field of children's rights. In somewhat broader terms the paper proposes that the formative logic of elite-driven globalization is a social and political dynamism related to the rules of competition and collaboration that structure inclusions, exclusions and awards in transnational fields

Children’s political geographies

This chapter introduces children’s political geographies from three perspectives. The first section discusses children’s place and role in political geographical research in general, providing a brief overview of the development that led to the problematization of children’s absence as participants from political geographical events, dynamics and power relations. The second section looks into the subfields of children’s and young people’s geographies and the role of politics in these relatively new research areas, in connection with the interdisciplinary field of childhood studies that provides them a broader social scientific context. The third section considers the geographies of children’s politics, portraying major themes that scholars have thus far engaged with in their attempts to make better sense of the political worlds where children’s everyday lives are embedded, and where they practice their agencies by mundane and more formal means

Devaluing personhood : The framing of migrants in the EU's new pact on migration and asylum

The latest EU policy initiative to regulate migration to the European Union is called the New Pact on Migration and Asylum. Compared with previous policies, the New Pact promotes and normalises multiple procedures that can have far-reaching consequences on migrants' agency, dignity, personhood, and vulnerability. As the EU's migration and asylum policies set the parameters for the governance of forced migration and access to asylum in the Member States, they also provide framings for the practical encounters between asylum seekers and the migration regime. These framings legitimise certain approaches to the management of asylum migration and the related interpretations of international human rights treaties both in the Member States and in the EU. By examining how migrants and their encounters with the EU are discussed and represented in the New Pact, we join the critical scholarship that has questioned the EU's supposed turn towards a more humane approach to migration. Examining the official voice of the EU, we conduct a critical policy analysis with a focus on terminology and framing, exploring three major frames through which the New Pact characterises migrants as part of its attempt to transform European asylum and migration governance. These frames relate to human classification, spatial coordination, and temporal control, each of which is linked to the management of encounters between migrants and the migration regime. We conclude by discussing what the New Pact's framing reveals about the EU's approaches to human vulnerability, dignity, agency, and (de)valued personhood.Peer reviewe

Seudullista kansalaisosallistumista jäljittämässä tiedon yhteistuottamisen keinoin

This article analyses an ongoing process of knowledge co-production concerning the role of citizens and participation in strategic city-regional planning, and discusses the theoretical and practical knowledge that results from the process. In knowledge co-production involving urban planning experts and researchers, three things stand out as key to successful outcomes: an ongoing dialogue between scientific and practical understanding, knowledge production as an accumulative process, and constructive criticism as a dynamism that pushes the frontiers of practical understanding. Based on our initial empirical findings about citizenship and participation on the city-regional level, we suggest that the role of broad value- and issue-based deliberation concerning the long-term aims of urban environment could be a fruitful starting point for discussions between citizens, experts and politicians within emerging city-regions.Peer reviewe