Session Information
25 SES 09, Children’s Rights: Theoretical and Methodological Issues
Parallel Paper Session
Contribution
This paper, which is theoretical in scope, argues that the achievement of children’s rights involves a doubled practice of critique: for educators, this involves commitment to spiritual transformation, and for children, opportunities to express truth in relation to the forms of governance they experience.
What are children’s rights if adult educators do not know the meaning of ‘children’ and ‘childhood’ in advance? In other words, if childhood is a state of always becoming (Casteneda, 2002) in relation to which adults have to constantly change themselves – what kinds of work does this entail? And what kind of work, moreover, is it necessary for children and young people to take up if these becomings are to include the right to tell the truth about their own situations?
I want to suggest that both sides of this complex relational dynamic can be illuminated through engagement with Foucault’s texts. More specifically, the challenge for adults in relation to the becomings of children, and the text of the UNCRC that aims to protect and to promote these becomings, has parallels with the kind of work that Foucault (2005, 2010, 2011) focused upon in his lectures at the Collège de France, in 1981-4. Here he contrasted a modern approach to knowledge, after the ‘Cartesian event’, where objects of knowledge are in principle graspable by any inquirer, with more traditional approaches, such as those characteristic of ancient Greek philosophy, where understanding is the outcome of a transformation, defined as spiritual practice (askesis). Here, the ‘object’ of concern, such as the realization of a particular good, cannot, in principle, be known without the subject undergoing change in their very being. The upshot of this, for adults, is commitment to a form of etho-poetic practice (McGushin, 2007) in which the text of the UNCRC becomes a fundamental rule.
The challenge for children is quite different, but not unconnected with this. In his paper ‘What is Critique?’ Foucault (2002) argues that practices of critique originally emerged in connection with unjust forms of governance, such as past abuses of ecclesiastical authority, where the fundamental impetus was ‘not to be governed like that’. Such situations, according to Foucault, gave rise to practices of critique. For children, therefore, this implies having access to the tools through which critique might be exercised, the right to voice their understanding of truth, and having these views taken seriously. Such critique is exercised in regard to specific orderings, whether institutional, professional or educational that are problematised and challenged. The practice of critique, therefore, is the expression of a courage that interrupts unproblematised ways of going on.
Method
Expected Outcomes
References
Butler, J. 2002 “What Is Critique? An Essay on Foucault’s Virtue,” in The Political, ed. D. Ingram, Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 212–28. Castaneda, C. 2002 Figurations: Child, Bodies, Worlds, London: Duke University Press. Deleuze, G. 1988 Foucault, E. trans. S. Hand, London: The Athlone Press. Foucault, M. 2011 The Courage of Truth, Lectures at the Collège de France 1983-4, ed., F. Gros, E. trans G. Burchell, Basingstoke, Hampshire and New York: Palgrave MacMillan. Foucault, M. 2010 The Government of Self and Others, Lectures at the Collège de France 1982-3, ed., F. Gros, E. trans G. Burchell, Basingstoke, Hampshire and New York: Palgrave MacMillan. Foucault, M. 2005 The Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the College de France, 1981-2, ed. F. Gros, E. trans G. Burchell, New York: Picador. Foucault, M. 2002 “What Is Critique?” E. trans. L. Hochroth, in The Political, ed. D. Ingram, Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 191-211. McGushin, E. F. 2007 Foucault’s Askesis: An Introduction to the Philosophical Life, Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press.
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