NW 25: Cultural, Political, and Institutional Context in Research on Children's Rights in Education

Network
NW 25. Research on Children's Rights in Education

Title
Cultural, Political, and Institutional Context in Research on Children's Rights in Education

Abstract
Children's rights in education are universally proclaimed but locally realised. This special call asks how context – cultural, political, and institutional – shapes what children's rights mean in educational settings, who holds the authority to define them, and which conditions enable or obstruct their implementation in schools and other educational settings. It invites work on underrepresented contexts, including the Global South, indigenous, minority and migrant communities, and conflict-affected settings; on the line between contextual adaptation of rights and their erosion; and on methodologies that capture context. Network 25 welcomes interdisciplinary contributions that theorise context rather than treat it as background.

The Call
The ECER 2027 theme, "Learning Communities and Shared Futures in Education," draws attention to learning as both an individual and a communal process, shaped by the relations, values, and governance arrangements of the communities in which it unfolds. Children's rights in education are embedded in context in the same way. Although the UNCRC has been ratified almost universally, its meaning is negotiated locally, within communities holding different understandings of childhood, authority, and the good life, and within institutional conditions that vary across and within States.

EERA Network 25 – Research on Children's Rights in Education invites contributions examining the role of context – cultural, political, and institutional – in the theory, practice, and politics of children's rights in education. Much scholarship in this field has been conducted in settings aligned with Western liberal values, which have shaped its philosophy, content, and structure, and tend to treat children and childhood as a homogeneous category. Studies in collectivist societies have shown the complexities of implementing rights within cultural frames that tie children's status to obligations towards family and community rather than individual entitlements (Faedi Duramy & Gal, 2020; Liebel, 2023). These debates sit within the broader discourse of cultural relativism, which addresses the challenge of translating rights into local contexts while retaining the core values of universal standards (Harris-Short, 2003; Twum-Danso Imoh, 2019). The questions are pressing amid declining globalisation, nationalism, hostility towards immigration, and polarising politics, which may dilute universal meanings of children's rights.

Context, however, is not reducible to culture, nor only national in scale. Rights come to life through meaning-making in the settings where children encounter them. Students' understandings of their rights are anchored in relationships with teachers and in everyday interactions rather than in designated lessons, and depend on adults' willingness to share power. They are shaped by school climate and by the coherence between what is taught and what children may exercise, and constrained by institutional practices that contradict rights aims. They are shaped, too, by governance and funding structures, accountability regimes, teachers' working conditions and legal literacy, and by whether the UNCRC is enforceable in domestic law. War, displacement, austerity, climate change, the datafication of schooling, and the use of AI generate further contexts, some cutting across national borders.

The call welcomes papers and symposia examining the place of context in research on children's rights in rducation, including:
●    How do local cultural, religious, and political frames shape what children's rights mean in educational settings, and who has the authority to define them?
●    Which contextual conditions – institutional, material, and relational – enable or obstruct the implementation of rights in educational settings?
●    How do children and young people understand their rights within different contexts?  
●    How can research distinguish contextual adaptation of children's rights from their erosion?
●    What can be learned from underrepresented contexts, including the Global South, Indigenous, minority and migrant communities, and conflict-affected settings?
●    Which methodologies capture context, and what are the ethics and politics of comparative research?

Network 25 encourages interdisciplinary approaches drawing on education, law, sociology, psychology, anthropology, philosophy, and political science, and particularly welcomes contributions that theorise context rather than treat it as background.

Contact Person(s)
Lotem Perry-Hazan (University of Haifa, lotem.perry(at)edu.haifa.ac.il), Co-Convenor of Network 25

References
Faedi Duramy, B., & Gal, T. (2020). Understanding and implementing child participation: Lessons from the Global South. Children and Youth Services Review, 119, 105645. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.childyouth.2020.105645 

Harris-Short, S. (2003). International human rights law: Imperialist, inept and ineffective? Cultural relativism and the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. Human Rights Quarterly, 25(1), 130–181. https://doi.org/10.1353/hrq.2003.0004 

Liebel, M. (with Budde, R., Markowska-Manista, U., & Meade, P.). (2023). Childhoods of the Global South: Children's rights and resistance. Policy Press.

Twum-Danso Imoh, A. (2019). Terminating childhood: Dissonance and synergy between global children's rights norms and local discourses about the transition from childhood to adulthood in Ghana. Human Rights Quarterly, 41(1), 160–182. https://doi.org/10.1353/hrq.2019.0007