Teaching ‘global childhoods’ in childhood studies

Childhood studies programs and generic social science programs in universities across the world increasingly offer courses that in some way focus on ‘global childhoods’. For this webinar, we will bring into conversations four prominent scholars who, based on their teaching and research experiences on ‘global childhoods’, will explore and reflect on four sets of ideas: theoretical and empirical framing of ‘global childhoods’, questions around intersectionality and positionality in teaching ‘global childhoods’, decolonization of curriculum and epistemological justice, and the role of Childhood Studies journals in fostering critical debates around knowledge production, research and training on ‘global childhoods’

Turning Global Rights into Local Realities:Realizing Children’s Rights in Ghana’s Pluralistic Society

ocusing on Ghana, the first country in sub-Saharan Africa to gain independence from European colonial rule and the first in the world to ratify the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, this book explores how dominant children's rights principles interact with the lived realities of a range of children’s lives.The author considers the changeability and inconsistencies of childhoods within this context and the factors that underpin these varied intersections, including cultural norms, British colonial legacy, the influence of Christianity, urbanization, and social, economic and political transformations.Challenging one-dimensional portrayals of childhoods in the Global South, the author highlights the need for more holistic approaches to the study of children’s lives and children’s rights realization in Southern contexts

Researching Colonial Childhoods:Accessing the Voices of Children in the Gold Coast (Ghana) 1900 -1957

Colonial archives hold an abundance of materials about Indigenous children’s lives. However, very little of the information stored in archives comes from the perspective of children growing up in colonized societies. Hence, children are clearly visible in colonial archives, but their voices are largely silent. This results in limited insights into children’s own understandings of their experiences of colonial rule and the impact it had on them as children and later as adults. This paper contributes to extant literature on researching colonial childhoods by reflecting on a study which supplemented archival research with oral history methods, to directly access the voices of individuals reflecting on their childhoods experienced during British colonial rule in the Gold Coast (present-day Ghana). The paper starts by critiquing the silence of children’s voices. The few exceptions to these silences, gathered through archival research, are presented before I outline how supplementing this approach with oral history methods enabled me to gain more holistic insights into children’s lived experiences. As oral history methods are not a panacea, I call for an approach to accessing the perspectives of children growing up under European colonial rule in sub–Saharan Africa that systematically integrates archival and oral history methods