Children and Young People's Participation and Its Transformative Potential: Learning from across Countries (Studies in Childhood and Youth)

Bringing together theories, ideas, insights and experiences of practitioners and researchers from Brazil, India, South Africa and the UK, this book explores children and young people's involvement in public action. The contributors consider the potential of children and young people's participation to be transformative. Participation has become a rallying cry for those committed to respecting children and young people as social actors in their own right, as a part of communities and societies. Yet children and young people's participation has faced considerable challenges in realizing the rhetoric, with concerns being raised that too much emphasis has been placed on the process of participation and too little emphasis on its broader aim. This book brings together theories, ideas, insights and experiences of practitioners and researchers from Brazil, India, South Africa and the UK on the theme of children and young people's involvement in public action. It explores the potential of children and young people's participation to be transformative and to challenge social and cultural structures that reproduce inequality and oppression. This book will be particularly appealing to those interested in children's rights, childhood and youth studies, and development studies Front Matter....Pages i-xvi Introduction: Children and Young People’s Participation in Collective Decision-making....Pages 1-21 Reflections on Participation and Its Link with Transformative Processes....Pages 22-43 Decolonizing the Notion of Participation of Children and Young People....Pages 44-60 Children and Young People’s Participation in Public Action in Brazil: Genealogies and Recent Innovations....Pages 61-78 Brazil’s Landless Movement and Children and Young People’s Participation....Pages 79-90 Children and Young People’s Participation in India: Framing Law, Policy and the Media....Pages 91-112 Transformative Participation: Experiences of a Children’s Sangam in Tamil Nadu (South India)....Pages 113-129 Unsettling Notions of Participation: A View from South Africa....Pages 130-149 Growing Up in a Time of AIDS: The Shining Recorders of Zisize....Pages 150-167 Children Should Be Seen and Heard? Children and Young People’s Participation in the UK....Pages 168-188 Transforming the Urban Environment: The EcoCity Project....Pages 189-207 Conclusion: Unlearning Participation....Pages 208-226 Back Matter....Pages 227-236