From International Legal Text into Practice: Issues in Translating the UNCRC

Author(s):

John I'Anson(presenting / submitting)

Conference:

ECER 2017

Network:

25. Research on Children's Rights in Education

Format:

Paper

Session Information

25 SES 01, Issues in Translation

Paper Session

Time:

2017-08-22

13:15-14:45

Room:

W4.13

Chair:

Carol Robinson

Contribution

The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC, 1989) as an international legal text necessitates multiple translations into national policy contexts if it is to become mobilised within professional practice. The aim of this paper is to foreground this process of translation and to identify some of the limitations inherent within present mobilisations of the UNCRC within European contexts. On the basis of this diagnosis, a series of ethical considerations that might inform a more critical and open-ended approach are raised.

Current approaches to mobilising the UNCRC are characterised as an international economy of rights and this is represented diagrammatically. This economy, it is argued, involves multiple translations of the UNCRC text into a series of performative demands to which adults become accountable in situations of professional practice with children and young people.

A critical analysis of this economy as presently instituted is offered that foregrounds a number of inherent limitations (I'Anson, 2016; James, 2007; Thede, 2001) . It is argued that a failure to address the issue of translation from legal text to relational practice has led to a technical resolution. The potential challenge of the UNCRC as an authoritative text of critique is further weakened by the promotion of a consensus thinking (Reinhardt et al., 2012) that privileges agreement over the complexities associated with ethical thinking. In the light of this critique, the paper identifies some new lines of questioning to inform debate concerning how a children’s rights agenda might in future be refracted differently.

Method

The paper draws upon an empirical philosophical methodology that is associated with the writings of Bruno Latour (2015; 2013; 2009; 2005; 1999). This enables a mapping of the different connections between socio-material entities as these become translated through lines of practice. It is argued that applying this approach to the translation of an international legal text (the UNCRC) into professional practice, in the diverse sites where adults and children and young people interact, provides new insight into assumptions that are made. The actual translations made are usually hidden from view, but once these are surfaced it becomes possible to inquire more critically into these - and, in the light of this, to entertain other ways forward. It is argued that this is desirable if an ethical - as distinct from technical - translation is to be made. Since children’s rights presupposes some ‘good’, relevant ethical theories will be explored in order to open up questions concerning new ways forward.

Expected Outcomes

This paper will argue that it is desirable to surface assumptions that inform the work of translation involved as the UNCRC as an international legal text is mobilised in situations where children’s rights is practised to date and that such inquiry enables some purchase upon the limitations inherent in present framings and mobilisations. More specifically, through problematising the current international children’s rights economy and identifying the multiple translations that are implicated in its performance, a number of critical junctures are located in relation to which questions might be engaged to think and practice in different terms. Given the importance of some understanding of the ‘good’ to thinking and practice within the field of children’s rights, this paper will foreground some of the ethical limitations of current ways of going on. An exploration of the ethical implications for mobilising rights points to issues that go well beyond the limitations of current translations into performance indicators. Such an orientation is both present and future-oriented and explores, as one ethicist has put this, ‘the ways that people work on themselves so as to be able to realise the good in the creation of their moral selves’; to this extent, a focus is upon ‘the ways people come to believe that they can successfully create a good beyond what is presently given in their lives’ (Robbins, 2013, p. 458). The focus upon such ethical imaginaries opens up new and exciting ways in which the legal text of the UNCRC might be translated in ways that promote the enactment of rights that are potentially more fully inclusive of children and young people.

References

I’Anson, J., “UNCRC at 25: a critical assessment of achievements and trajectories with reference to educational research”, in J. Gillett-Swan and V. Coppock, (eds.), Children's Rights, Educational Research and the UNCRC past, present and future, (Oxford: Symposium, 2016: 17-37). James, A., “Giving Voice to Children’s Voices: Practices and Problems, Pitfalls and Potentials”, American Anthropologist, 109 (2), (2007): 261-272. Latour, B., “The strange entanglement of jurimorphs”, A chapter prepared for a volume edited by K. McGee, Bruno Latour and the Passage of Law (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press 2015). Available at: http://www.bruno-latour.fr/node/614 Latour, B., An Inquiry into Modes of Existence: An Anthropology of the Moderns (Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London: Harvard University Press 2013). Latour, B., The Making of Law: An Ethnography of the Conseil d’Etat (Cambridge and Malden, MA.: Polity Press 2009). Latour, B., Reassembling the Social – An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2005). Latour, B., Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies (Harvard University Press 1999). Reynaert, D., Bouverne-De Bie, M. and Vandevelde, S., “Between ‘believers’ and ‘opponents’: Critical discussions on children’s rights”, International Journal of Children’s Rights 20(1) (2012): 155–168. Robbins, J., “Beyond the suffering subject: toward an anthropology of the good”, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.), 19 (2013): 447-462. Thede, N., “Human Rights and Statistics – Some Reflections on the No-Man’s-Land between Concept and Indicator”, Statistical Journal of the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe, 18 (2-3) (2001): 259-273. United Nations, The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC), General Assembly resolution 44/25 (20 Nov. 1989) U.N. Doc. A/ RES/44/25. Available at: http://www.ohchr.org/en/professionalinterest/pages/crc.aspx

Author Information

John I'Anson (presenting / submitting)

University of Stirling

School of Applied Social Science and Education

Stirling

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