Thirty years after the ratification of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child questions are being raised as to the applicability of the Convention in troubled and challenging worldly times (Veerman, 2010; Quennerstedt, 2013). An acknowledgement of the value and importance of the Convention does not mitigate the recognition that the Convention is also dated, and embedded with human centric assumptive theorisations of the child, developed at a specific point in time. These are in addition to the concerns that the UNCRC is not contextually fluid and is based on, and informed by, Western standards and cultural understandings (Hanson & Nieuwenhyus, 2012; Pupovac, 2001).

Addressing these concerns, Quennerstedt (2013) argues that a consensual approach to the application of the Convention within educational research leads to the risk of normalising basic assumptions about rights and is therefore dangerously narrow. Research that unquestionably draws on the Convention as a basis for rights-based research with children has created a research environment where the Convention not only goes uncritiqued but also serves as a guide for policy and practice in a global environment where the world’s reality does not meet the aspirations of the document (Reynaert, Desmet, Lembrechts & Vandenhole, 2015). Despite the ratification and implementation of such Conventions as the UNCRC global crises continue to escalate. If a worldly sustainable co-existence of all is genuinely sought, then a re-think is needed in regard to assumptive Convention-based practices relating to children’s rights in educational research. Our research question asks: What are the possibilities for imagining innovative, ethical new perspectives of children’s agency that go beyond a Western, anthropocentric rights-based approach? What the risks of critical engagement with the UNCRC at this point in time?

We draw on post-human theoretical concepts with the objective to explore children's agency as emerging ethical everyday practices. Re-thinking and re-imagining the notion of agency challenges the understanding that rights and agency dwell in, or are held by, an individual human (such as a child). We theorise that dispersed agency emerges through a relational ontology where humans are always deeply entangled with worldly matter, including more-than-human others (Hinchliffe, Kearnes, Degen, & Whatmore, 2005). 

A relational ontology challenges the tradition of rights-based educational research with its singular focus on human rights. In this presentation we consider how this focus could be broadened through a theoretical framework that positions agency as a process of intra-action where humans are in constant relationship with the more-than-human (Barad, 2007). Our interest lies in exploring the possibilities of rights based educational research that includes both human and non-human with a commitment to the intent of ‘supporting sustainable peaceful and equitable global co-existence’ (call for papers, ECER, 2019). We maintain that to work towards this aim there is an opportunity to realign understandings of rights and agency beyond a human centric focus. We argue that given the impact of the Anthropocene it is time to consider children’s rights in more depth and re-align understandings of agency to think ethically about the notion of rights with regard to the world that we share with others of all kinds (Haraway, 2016).

There is an assumption in early childhood research that video data provides evidence of children’s agency by giving authentic voice and presence to children, and by enabling children to make decisions about what is important from their point of view. In this presentation, we explore how videography worked in two different research projects with young children. Video data in the form of still images, short snapshot videos and longer videos has been analysed from a post-human theoretical perspective. We investigate what becomes possible to see and think when we consider the video data as performances of child, camera and researcher, entangled in a spatial-temporal event. In both projects we used GoProHero5 cameras. This kind of camera is a little black box, with no screen to view filming. The GoPro became a little-black-box-of-secrets, a Pandora’s box, as we had no idea what exactly was filmed when children ran off with the cameras to ‘film’. It was important to the aims of the project to make the GoPros available to children whenever they wanted to experiment with it. When connected to computers, the GoPros spilled their content onto the screen and it appeared that some of the data was seemingly un-usable. Images were upside down, there were close-up shots of the footpath, or images were somewhat indecipherable altogether. There were also videos of unexpected movements (such as very slow walking), unexpected others (such as sleeping bats and native orchids) that became visible to us when viewing the data through a relational ontology lens. Some of the children’s ethical engagement with matter, more-than-human and human others as worldly everyday practices emerged alongside images children’s close-up encounters with matter of all kinds. Our aim is to further theorise intra-active, dispersed agency and to make visible/tangible some of the children’s worldly ethics of care. Together, child, GoPro and videos are challenging what counts as useful video data and unsettle the assumption that we can know ‘the child’s perspective’ by letting the child take charge of the video camera.

There is an assumption within early childhood education research that a child’s active participation in research equates to upholding their rights and enacting their agency. Within educational research that is closely aligned with the UNCRC, participation has emerged as one of numerous central themes (Reynaert, Bouverne-De Bie & Vandevelde, 2009). In contrast to this position, our current research strives to incorporate a broadened rights-based stance that utilises post-human research orientations to account for the understanding that rights and agency come about through an intra-active entanglement of encounters between multiple entities. At a time of human-induced planetary crisis, where humans have to learn to live with massive global issues such as climate change, pollution, loss of biodiversity, increased inequalities, water and food insecurities and related problems, human and more-than-human rights to flourish and to survive together begin to co-emerge as a focus in our research with young children. In this theoretical orientation, the ability and capacity to act and to have agency is recognised as coming into being through the intra-active relations of specific material and discursive conditions within observable phenomena and is not contained exclusively to humans. Some of our findings highlight that a narrow conception of rights prevents the perception of these more-than-human entanglements For a sustainable, equitable world, however, it is of vital importance to broaden perception and imagine new possibilities for living together that enable the flourishing of all life on this planet. The risks of not embarking on a radical non-anthropocentrical re-thinking of rights and agency are that life as we know it ends.

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