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This special issue brings together contributions from researchers concerned with how children's rights impact on their lifeworlds in developing countries. Taking an anthropological approach that focuses on the lives of vulnerable children in a variety of contexts across the globe, the authors tease out the complex ways in which rights-based policies mesh with the practice of doing development and in the process can become entangled, welded together or clash with children's ideas of right and wrong.Beyond lofty intentions of protecting children worldwide against all sorts of abuse and granting them a wide range of material and immaterial rights, applying a children's rights perspective in development work has sparked intense debate. Much of this debate is about the paradox that taking

To start our conversation, I wonder if you would think of your own research as 'global' or as 'local' research? Also, how do you understand the terms 'local', 'global' and 'globalized' childhood? Do you personally find these terms useful/ productive? STUART AITKEN: For some time now, I've been persuaded by the notion of flat ontologies. Sally Marston and her colleagues David Woodward and J.P. Jones published the now famous piece in the Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers (Marston et al., 2005) that looked at the production of scale for what it was: precisely that, a production. They argued for an intense focus on flat networks and relationalities rather than hierarchical scales, and that is how I like to proceed with my own work with children and young people. I've published books on children and globalization, youth activists jumping scale (to use the term of the late, great Neil Smith, 1992) to affect national and international politics, the impact of neoliberal forms of governance on young people and so forth, and it always seems to come down to (if you will pardon the pun) engagement and aesthetics (the latter formed by the ideas of Jacques Rancière). My empirical work these days looks at young people as part of communities of care rather than scaled communities. Now, it is possible for some people (politicians, CEOs) to create scales and hierarchies to shut young people down so I do not want to diminish the politics behind the production of scale, but for me, at least at the moment, I am very much concerned with reproduction in the sense that Elizabeth Grosz and others use that term. I want to use the term reproduction here in perhaps a more expansive way than it is used by contemporary feminists like Grosz, Cindi Katz, Katharyne Mitchell and others, as the potential for young people to reproduce and remake themselves differently. The importance of the right to create and recreate themselves and their spaces is in the best interests of young people (and adults) and, as a consequence, the focus on spatial rights is not only about occupying spaces that are suitable for access to housing, livelihoods and education but also the right to stay put as well as right of movement and 779480C HD0010.

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