40230 - Political Contention and Children’s Rights in the United States

Description

The United States is the only UN member state that has not signed the Convention on the Rights of the Childhood. Children’s rights, as an ethical, political, and analytic framework only occasionally appears within U.S. sociological research and analysis. However, at the same time, we see significant public debates regarding children’s rights, often not named as such. From attempts to limit young people’s access to information and knowledge via book bans and other curricular interventions, to the serious threats to trans children’s rights to make decisions about their own bodies, to the court cases that seek to hold governments and corporations accountable for the climate crisis and its impacts on young people, to the campaigns to lower the voting age to 16, to the varied responses to young people who migrate across national borders, to racialized and gendered claims about children’s culpability or innocence when confronting police and carceral systems, it is clear that the figure of the child plays a critical role in contemporary US politics. This panel brings together scholars working across some of these different sites of social and political contention around childhood to consider the following questions: What does a children’s rights lens illuminate about this issue? How might the international debates and diverse theoretical frameworks surrounding children’s rights shift the terrain of our analysis and engagement with this struggle? What are the conceptual and political benefits to thinking across these various sites of contestation over children and childhood?

Sub Unit

• Special Session

Presider

• Jessica Taft, University of California-Santa Cruz

Panelists

• Carla Shedd, Georgetown University

• Chiara Galli, University of Chicago

• Chris A. Barcelos, University of Massachusetts-Boston

• Amanda Evelyn Lewis, University of Illinois-Chicago

Session Organizer

• Jessica Taft, University of California-Santa Cruz