Embodying children’s rights in Italy and Spain: Unmasking some elements of the cultural politics of childhood

Abstract

This study explores how some aspects of the cultural politics of childhood in Italy and Spain limit, allow or encourage the fuller realisation of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, using the complementary voices of 49 participants, including policymakers, leaders of third sector organisations and families in vulnerable situations. Our research contributes to the advancement of the field by contextualising some of the facilitating and challenging factors regarding the enforcement of children's rights, divided into three different levels of analysis: structural factors, political factors and cultural factors.

Editorial: Reconstructing social space: spatial dynamics through gendered, cultural and emotional lenses

“…In the present day, we can identify many social spaces that shape our experiences, especially the significant intimate spaces of everyday life where we live, care, and work. Even children's rights, which are universal and abstract, are embodied and fully realized (or not) in a particular social space (Grau-Grau et al, 2021). Migration and mobility also create transnational spaces, within which the movement of some people is promoted and for others limited by borders and fences; there are also imaginative spaces, those that live in our memories, or places of social escape like prisons, health wards, or retreats, among others.…”