This paper will offer an historical contextualisation of some of the ways in which the UNCRC has become imbricated with educational research during the past twenty-five years. It will identify some of the key themes, tropes, orientations and theoretical traditions that have informed children’s rights research to date, with particular reference to education. While the text of the UNCRC is the product of a legal mode (Latour, 2013) it is mobilised in largely extra-legal contexts that cut across the multiple cultures, spaces and discourses that bear upon children’s lives. To this extent, the UNCRC offers a distinctive counterpoint (Brown, 2005) that resists simplification and colonisation whilst insistently raising difficult questions that are at once ethical, political, and existential in scope. Some of the ways in which such issues have been taken up in the context of educational research will be considered in this paper, illustrated by papers given within Network 25. References Brown, W. 2005 Edgework: Critical Essays on Knowledge and Politics, Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press. Latour, B. 2013 An Inquiry into Modes of Existence: An Anthropology of the Moderns, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London: Harvard University Press.