Paper short abstract:

Through a critical analysis of the encounter between rights-based paradigms and feminist, anti-colonial scholarship on child participation, this paper argues that untangling children’s epistemologies from Eurocentric discourses is crucial to decolonising international development research.

Paper long abstract:

This paper presents a critical analysis of the encounter between rights-based paradigms and feminist decolonial perspectives of child participation in international development. Inspired by the New Social Movements of the 1960s, participatory scholarship flourished in the late 1970s as a challenge to dominant research paradigms rooted in Eurocentric, positivist biases (Chambers, 1997; Fals Borda, 1979). Such scholarship, however, remained largely adult-centric until after the emergence of the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) (United Nations, 1989), which provided the ontological and normative framework for children as subjects of rights, and thereby bestowed upon them right to be heard (Article 12). This paper argues that, as the CRC has come to constitute the dominant paradigm in research with children (Boyden and Ennew, 1997; Lundy, 2007), it also functions discursively to render certain forms of children’s knowledge illegitimate. The paper draws upon literature from decolonial feminist scholars engaged in participatory research with children who have sought to destabilise the Othering, Western-centric tendencies of rights-based child participation, including with a focus on: working children in Peru (Taft, 2019); children whose homes have been demolished by Israeli occupying forces in East Jerusalem (Shalhoub-Kevorkian, 2009); and girls who have supported resistance fighters in Sri Lanka (Gowrinathan, 2021). Finally, drawing on personal insights and experiences of working alongside child and youth human rights defenders through the lens of subaltern theory, the paper considers alternatives through which children’s epistemologies can be explored and elevated as crucial forms of knowledge to counteract colonial hegemony in international development research.