Children’s Participation in the Context of Inequalities: Confronting Children’s Agency, Social Positioning, and Power Disparity

This book takes up theoretical and practical discussions of children and young people’s participation in public decision-making by taking into account existing literature from throughout childhood studies, sociology of childhood, children’s human rights studies, decolonization studies, and intersectionality studies. Through case studies conducted in Brazil, Bangladesh, Sierra Leone, and Ghana, Cuevas-Parra provides extensive empirical data from beyond the Global North and confronts dominant views of power, inequalities, and agency. The understanding that children and young people are immersed in intersectional social structures, where they are never ’simply children’ but individuals with multiple specific identities, cuts across the book.

Patricio Cuevas-Parra is Honorary Fellow of the Moray House School of Education at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, and Director for Child Participation and Rights at World Vision International. He is also a member of the Childhood and Youth Studies.