This conference invites children and youths, scholars, practitioners, students, and policymakers to engage in critical, cross-cultural, and decolonial dialogues on children's rights. We ask how children's rights frameworks travel across cultural, political, and socio-legal contexts. We examine how they are shaped by unequal geopolitical relations and colonial legacies. And we inquire how they may be transformed to better reflect the lived childhoods of children across the globe, including children living with the intersecting crises of climate injustice, racial discrimination, war and conflict, poverty, and social exclusion.

We welcome contributions from a wide range of disciplines — law, sociology, anthropology, education, social work, childhood studies, and beyond — and particularly encourage participation from children and youth, students, scholars, and policy-makers from the Global South.

Contributions may address, but are not limited to, the following questions:

• Decolonising rights - What does it mean to decolonise children's rights? How do colonial and neocolonial legacies shape children's rights discourses locally and globally? What alternative normative foundations—including Indigenous philosophies, communal ethics, and Global South legal traditions—can be utilised to enrich dominant frameworks?
• Rights in translation - How do children’s rights frameworks travel across cultural, political, and socio-legal contexts? What is gained and what is lost in translation? How do children, communities, and practitioners interpret, adapt, and contest rights in their specific situations?
• Epistemic justice - Whose knowledge counts in children's rights research and practice? How can non-Western, Indigenous and community-based knowledges be centred in international debates?
• Equality, intersectionality, and structural critique - How do colonial, racialised, classed, gendered and generational hierarchies shape access to rights and the conditions of childhood? How can a critical orientation to equality address not only legal rights but also substantive inequalities?
• Global challenges and children’s everyday lives - How do intersecting global crises — climate change, migration, conflict, poverty, democratic erosion—shape children's rights claims and lived experiences? What does rights-based analysis contribute to understanding and responding to these crises?
• Enacting Rights Otherwise - What practices in enhancing children’s rights have been developed, tested, and contested? What has failed, and what has been learned?
• Positionality and reflexivity in research - How do researchers’ own backgrounds, disciplines, and geographic locations shape the questions they ask and the answers they produce? What does it mean to do critical, decolonial children's rights research in practice?
• Methodology and pedagogy - What research methods, pedagogical approaches, and teaching practices support critical and decolonial knowledge production? How can cross-cultural, intergenerational, and community-based collaborations generate new forms of knowledge?

Practical Information

• Conference dates: 2-4 June 2027
• Working languages: English. We encourage organisers to explore multilingual formats in panel and workshop sessions.
• Abstract submission deadline: 1 November 2026
• Notification of acceptance: 15 December 2026
• Conference registration deadline: 1 February 2027

For abstract submission and other inquiries: barnconference@ipl.ntnu.no  

Full Information: https://www.ntnu.no/ipl/imagining-children-s-rights