Browsing by Person "Tisdall, E. Kay M."

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Contemporary Children’s Rights Issues in Early Childhood
(New York University Press, 2025-01) Blaisdell, Caralyn; Tisdall, E. Kay M.; Todres, Jonathan; Kilkelly, Urusla
Childhood can be seen as socially constructed, across time, geographies, and contexts. Young children have been particularly constructed, at least in the Global North, as vulnerable, dependent, innocent, and incompetent, and thus increasingly deserving of protection, provision, and investment in the early years. This construction has been substantially supported by child development, with its extensive history of research attention to young children, including infants. In turn, this construction has been challenged by the arguments that have emerged in recent debates: i.e., that children are (also) social actors, express their agency, and have human rights. The social constructions, as argued in this Chapter, are not just academic insights; they have very real policy and practice implications for young children. This Chapter considers three contemporary issues, which are illuminated by considering how young children and early childhood are socially constructed, and provide insights to their rights. First, the chapter explores young children’s participation rights and how they can be restricted or enhanced by intergenerational relations and power. Second, the chapter considers the pervasiveness of young children’s construction as ‘vulnerable’ and dependent, which has led both to policy and practice investment in early years but has not always focused attention on how young children are made situationally vulnerable. Third, the chapter discusses the challenge of decolonial and anti-racist thought in early childhood studies and the construction of children as co-creators of more just futures. The chapter concludes by considering the learning from young children and early childhood studies for the wider fields of childhood studies, children’s right studies, and human rights: about the need to bring in relationality to rights, while ensuring respect for children’s human dignity; the questioning of vulnerability as being useful or unique to children, and the challenge of considering the universal vulnerability of everyone; and the fundamental unsettling of Global North assumptions by considering antiracism and decolonization.
The emotional relations of children's participation rights in diverse social and spatial contexts: Advancing the field
(2021-06-28) Blaisdell, Caralyn; Kustatscher, Marlies; Zhu, Yan; Tisdall, E. Kay M.
Children's participation rights, enshrined in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989), have been a popular area of research, policy and practice for decades. Despite a great deal of interest and activity, participation rights have posed a particular challenge to implement. In response, researchers have consistently called for more in-depth and nuanced analyses of the way participatory rights are actually lived and experienced by children and young people, within the complexity of interdependent relationships. However, there has been surprisingly little focus on the emotional relations of children's participation rights. The analytical links between emotions and participation rights are rarely the focus and, where emotions are discussed, they are rarely discussed as a central concern in their own right. This article provides a review of the field and identifies three ways in which making emotions a central concern can help to advance debates on children's participation rights: by helping to unsettle ‘traditional’ constructions of the child-adult binary, by increasing sensitivity to ethical and safeguarding issues, and by making visible and challenging intersectional power relations.
Introduction to the Special Issue on involving children and young people in research
(University of Victoria, 2014) Blaisdell, Caralyn; Harden, Jeni; Tisdall, E. Kay M.
The status of children and young people in social research has been a key area of debate since the emergence of the “new” sociology of childhood in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Sparked initially by work in sociology and anthropology, the sociology of childhood rapidly spread to become an interdisciplinary area of interest, now commonly referred to as “childhood studies”, to recognize its increasing multi-disciplinary spread (Punch & Tisdall, 2012). With the emergence of this paradigm, new ways of conceptualizing and theorizing childhood were linked to changes in how research with children and young people was conducted. Researchers considered how their own understandings of childhood, constructed by “culturally and historically specific beliefs and assumptions” (Harden, Scott, Backett-Milburn, & Jackson, 2000, 2.4), affected the way they engaged with children and young people in the research context. The concept of children’s agency was enthusiastically adopted by the nascent childhood studies community (James & Prout, 1997) and underpinned attempts to allow children and young people a “more direct voice and participation” (Prout & James, 1997, p. 8) in research about their lives. This agenda stood in contrast to historic – and cross-disciplinary – research practice, which relied on the perspectives of adult researchers, professionals, or parents (Woodgate, 2001). There were also strong links with a children’s rights perspective, a core element of which is children and young people’s “right to be heard” (United Nations [UN] Committee on the Rights of the Child, 2009).