The School of Education at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, is pleased to host its second Contemporary Childhood Conference, which will take place on 2-3 September 2016.
Citizenship and Civic Education take a range of forms, but the overall goal is to support children and young people’s participation in their immediate society and the wider world. The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) mandates the active participation of children in ‘all matters that concern them’ and has encouraged a global effort to include children and young people in discussion and decision-making. From specified curricular programmes, to institutional structures, to adopting and practising participatory approaches, the realisation of this effort varies greatly.
The notion of the child citizen remains ill-defined, and in the context of the democratic deficit, declining voter turnout and rapid globalisation, the question of what a child citizen is and how best to foster their civic participation is becoming increasingly important.
Professor Laura Lundy is the keynote speaker at this event. Laura Lundy is the Director of the Centre for Children’s Rights at Queen’s University, Belfast. She is an expert in rights-based participatory research with children and publishes widely on international children’s rights with a particular focus on the implementation of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, education rights and children’s rights to participate in decision-making.
Professor Lundy’s conceptualisation of children’s right to participate in decision-making (based on four core concepts – Space, Voice, Audience and Influence) and published in the British Educational Research Journal in 2007 is one of the most highly cited children’s rights papers and the model has been used widely by academics and policy makers.
Registration for this conference is still open for a few days: http://www.strath.ac.uk/humanities/schoolofeducation/newsevents/contemporarychildhoodconference2016/. All are welcome! For more information, please contact Dr Claire Cassidy, claire.cassidy@strath.ac.uk.