Poetry for Rights! Intergenerational Co-creation for Child Rights Scholarship

Abstract

This article presents the work of a group of child rights activists including children, young people and a supporting adult, who creatively convey their thoughts and feelings about the most pressing contemporary issues in the field of children’s rights and explore implications for intergenerational co-authorship in the child rights space. The children and young people decided to use poetry as a form of communication to express themselves about the challenges and aspirations of being child rights activists in an era of polycrisis, and they then worked together to analyse the poems, identifying cross-cutting themes around mental health, navigating power relationships and demands for a more inclusive, equitable future. The text of the article contains links to online video recordings of the authors performing their poetry, inviting readers to immerse themselves in a multi-sensory experience of child-led, child rights scholarship. Accordingly, the article presents an exploration of imaginative, interactive and intergenerational scholarship on children’s rights and suggests that co-creation with children may provide a way of upholding children’s rights while making space for new epistemologies that challenge Eurocentric, adultist norms of knowledge production in the child rights space.

Keywords: child rights; child participation; arts-based methods.