Exploring child-led research: case studies from Bangladesh, Lebanon and Jordan

The right to participate and express a view is an intrinsic right afforded to all human beings, regardless of age (Lundy, 2007). Explicitly, Articles 12, 13, 14 and 15 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) grant participatory rights to children and young people in decision-making. One of the forms of participation academics and practitioners have studied over the past decades, the engagement of children and young people in participatory processes, is moving away from the understanding of children as passive recipients of research to active participants. However, literature has paid scant attention to research led directly by children and young people (Thomas, 2015). Child-led research is understood, as starting definition from literature, as an approach in which children and young people are involved in all stages – from planning, fieldwork and analysis to dissemination. The aim of this research is to critically explore how the process and outcomes of children and young people’s participation in their own child-led research contributes, positively or negatively, to decision-making processes in the context of international development programmes. The research questions are: Question 1: What are children and young people’s motivations for, expectations of and experiences with engaging in their own child-led research as a way to influence decision-making? Question 2: What are the processes of child-led research that positively or negatively influence decision-making? Question 3: In what ways does child-led research influence decision-making? (And why and how do they do so?) This research project used a case study approach to examine two cases where children and young people claimed they conducted child-led research. The first, Bekaa and Irbid, investigated the research conducted by a group of children and young people on issues relevant to their situations as refugees in the host countries of Lebanon and Jordan. The second, Dhaka, reviewed child-led research focused on the lack of birth certificates issued for Bangladeshi children and the possible effects of not having this legal registration. A group of children and young people who are members of a Children’s Parliament in Dhaka led this project. The research participants for this project are defined as (1) the children and young people, aged 12 to 18 (when I interviewed them), who are associated with World Vision programmes and engaged in the child-led research projects within their constituencies in the Irbid and Bekaa and Dhaka case studies and (2) the adult professionals who acted as facilitators of child-led research projects and those who worked in the design of these projects or dissemination of their findings. These participants were those who were best suited to provide the information needed as they were fully involved in the child-led research projects and had in-depth knowledge to contribute answers to the research questions. This project adopted several methods for data collection, including focus groups, semi-structured interviews, observations and documentary review. The study followed ethical research guidelines to ensure the safety, rights, dignity and well-being of both the children and young people and adult participants (Morrow, 2009). The research took into account the special considerations required to gain informed consent, ensure confidentiality and anonymity, acknowledge the cultures of the research sites, and refrain from presenting information that may potentially harm participants (Marshall and Rossman, 2006). The findings of the study show that the child-led research approach is considered an adequate participatory approach that creates spaces for children and young people to engage in their own research and influence change based on their findings. Thus, this approach enabled participants to gather together and pursue collectively a research project in which they were able to explore issues about their lives using research methodologies that were appropriate to their experiences, abilities and expertise. This conversion, however, highlights a variety of tensions around the understanding and legitimacy of child-led research. Findings from this study supports the view that child-led research generates empirically grounded knowledge, which produced through data collection and personal experiences of the young researches and its analysis as a whole. Findings also reveal that the young researchers’ motivations and expectations were to make an impact on their own lives, as well as the lives of their peers and change a situation that they perceived as unfair. Findings show that the adult facilitators played an important role in facilitating the young researchers but not managing them. However, this study evidenced some tensions between participation and protection rights. The study found manifestations of power amongst the children and young people during the child-led research projects, which were based on age, gender, religion, language and ethnicity. This confirms children and young people can replicate power relations within their participatory projects, which are deeply embedded in their traditions and cultures. Findings show that child-led research has different levels of impact; on decision-making and in the individual lives of the young researchers. This is connected to the contexts where children and young people conducted their research, which was conducive in one case study and more challenging in the other case. Overall, the findings of this study contribute to the body of literature that challenges the dominant conceptualisation that children and young people are unable to conduct their own research. Instead, the findings of this research project contribute to the study of children and young people’s participation by providing different perspectives on the debate around the children and young people’s abilities and motivations to engage in their own child-led research projects. The findings contribute to knowledge about the nature of child-led research as an approach that supports children and young people in their struggle to participate in society. These findings contribute to the substantial gap of understanding about what is knowledge and expertise by exploring the ways in which children and young people conduct their own research and create knowledge with the aim of making a change in society. Specifically, the findings provide empirical evidence of the impact that their work has had on policy and practice and their personal lives

Using a human rights lens:Learning from children's activism

A new wave of children’s activism is gathering apace, from children’s school strikes for climate change, to the call for gun control in the USA. As children claim their own spaces, for their own priorities, this provides an opportunity for the children’s human rights field to consider how it can support such initiatives and also learn from them. This chapter asks how children’s activism can be understood through a human rights lens, drawing on researched examples of children’s activism to illuminate the answers. The chapter concludes by suggesting how such activism encourages support for children’s participation beyond the minimum requirements of the UN Convention on the Rights of Child, recognises children as political actors, repositions children as knowledge holders, and thus redistributes power within intergenerational relations

Girls engaging in activism to end child marriage in Sierra Leone: Negotiating power, interacting with others and redefining their own lives

Children's right to participate has been one of the most challenging rights to implement due to dominant norms which position children under adults' authority. Notably, this has more negatively impacted girls than boys due to traditional gender norms and practices that often restrict girls' agency and are reproduced and unchallenged in many societies. To contest these struggles, young female activists (13–17 years) in Sierra Leone, who are the focus of this paper, engaged in direct actions to influence public decision-making and prevent girls from being married during childhood. Drawing upon empirical evidence exploring the girls' activism experiences, this article explore, young female activists' practical work is an example of what intersectionality as praxis means by connecting social categories to inequalities and highlights that they saw themselves as social actors with the ability to negotiate power, take part in community-based activism to end child marriage and network with others to seek justice for practices and attitudes they perceived to be abusive

Cuestionamientos al modelo extractivista neoliberal desde el Sur

Este libro se enmarca en la voluntad de alimentar un diálogo inter-disciplinar entre múltiples esferas sociales, culturales y territoriales en relation al extractivismo, su estudio y vivencia. El libro se constituye en un instrumento que expresa un entrelazamiento entre actores, redes y realidades territoriales que dan forma a la riqueza y a la diversidad de los territorios amenazados actualmente por el extractivismo. Permitiendo una réflexión sobre el présente y el futuro del modelo de desarrollo actual, la présente publicación integra diverso