From 5 to 7 June 2024, the first K-Reporters International Workshop Framing critical childhood studies and decoloniality to intersectionalise children's rights, took place at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) in Trondheim, Norway. The workshop brought together members of the K-Reporters project to collectively reflect on how childhood studies and children’s rights can be rethought from interdisciplinary, intersectional, and decolonial perspectives.

The workshop aimed to lay the groundwork for reconceptualising childhood studies and children’s rights by critically engaging with questions of power, inequality, and knowledge production across diverse geographical and disciplinary contexts. Through invited keynote lectures and internal participatory sessions, participants explored what it means to adopt intersectional and decolonial approaches in research, theory, and praxis.

Critical Conversations

The programme was structured around three keynote contributions that fostered in-depth discussion and debate:

• Kristina Konstantoni reflected on the role of intersectionality in childhood studies, drawing on her long-standing research and teaching experience, including work with The Play Café Project. Her keynote highlighted intersectionality not only as an analytical framework, but also as a counter-hegemonic praxis that challenges dominant forms of knowledge production.

• Afua Twum-Danso Imoh offered a critical perspective on children’s rights studies, questioning dominant top-down and universalist approaches. She emphasised the importance of relationality, reciprocity, and context, and argued for understanding children’s rights as a contested terrain shaped by diverse normative traditions in both the Global North and the Global South.

• Verónica Pacini-Ketchabaw introduced anti-colonial practices through her work with children and women in extractive territories in Andean Ecuador. Her contribution invited participants to think critically about childhood and children’s rights in the context of extractivism, coloniality, and the Capitalocene, and to consider how children are actively worlding worlds under these conditions.

Creative Assemblages and Participatory Spaces

In addition to the public lectures, the workshop included two internal participatory sessions designed to support collective reflection among K-Reporters researchers. These Creative Assemblages focused on understanding how assemblage thinking can help make sense of the interconnectedness of disciplines, contexts, and lived experiences in research with children.

Participants discussed the importance of local research contexts, developing situated understandings of children’s communities, and reflecting on how intersectionality resonates across conflict and post-conflict settings, which are central to the K-Reporters project.

KReporters - WP1

As part of Work Package 1 (WP1) of the K-Reporters project, this first international workshop created a shared conceptual foundation for future research activities. It fostered critical dialogue, collective learning, and collaboration, setting the stage for ongoing work on childhoods, children’s rights, and knowledge production across diverse contexts.

Check out the Proceedings with collective reflections