Richard C . Mitchell

As an entry point into this final project in a trilogy linking Freirean pedagogies with transdisciplinarity, our Introduction offers a brief synopsis of the chapters focused on this volume’s theme of environmental sustainability, along with an analysis of key conceptual themes, at a time of unparalleled crisis and uncertainty for our planet.

These are unprecedented times for democratic traditions as world society drifts almost rudderless towards neo-liberal capitalist collapse without many alternative visions coming into view (Hyslop-Margison & Thayer, 2009). As a response, the authors present thematic and theoretical findings from a case study utilising grounded theory analytical procedures to look at aspects of active child and youth citizenship in Ontario, Canada.

This paper investigates theoretical and practice intersections in Canada between the principles and provisions of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, and the UN's Basic Principles on the Use of Restorative Justice in Criminal Justice Matters. We undertook this exploratory study from a transdisciplinary standpoint and utilised grounded theory methodological and analytical procedures throughout; data include legal and policy documentary analyses along with eight key informant interviews. Findings indicate that CRC implementation has been impeded by myopic disciplinary approaches that have dissolved its constituent principles by isolating them from its provisions. Young people's human rights are languishing within Canadian juvenile justice contexts, and thus, historical efforts to build an ecosystem of rights-respecting communities in that nation are being compromised. The paper concludes with a reiteration of a CRC implementation model which articulates the balance amongst participation, protection and power relations.

As an entry point into this final project in a trilogy linking Freirean pedagogies with transdisciplinarity, our Introduction offers a brief synopsis of the chapters focused on this volume’s theme of environmental sustainability, along with an analysis of key conceptual themes, at a time of unparalleled crisis and uncertainty for our planet.

The authors' aim is to promote compliance with international legal standards by articulating intersections between young people's human rights and restorative justice principles — for legal theorists through transdisciplinary thinking and for practitioners by introducing the Rights Based Restorative Practice Evaluation ToolKit developed through this conceptual framework (Moore, 2008). This comprehensive approach was developed within the Canadian legal, social policy and youth justice contexts. Notwithstanding potential bias stemming from cultural or political milieu, the authors argue that rights-based restorative justice could contribute to the advancement of ethical practice in many UN-member states attempting to adopt these common frameworks.

ual of Mental Disorders 4th Edition-Revised (DSM-IV-R) to determine diagnoses such as Conduct Disorder or Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder occurs without sufficient critical regard for its ideologically and historically situated assumptions. The author argues for a parallel theoretical framework to guide interventions that is provided for children’s practitioners through ongoing implementation of the United Nations Conven-tion on the Rights of the Child. Rather than relying solely upon the deficit labelling of the DSM-IV-R with its underlying deterministic beliefs about child development, this holistic, rights-based approach assumes young people to be competent social actors whose lives are worthy of study in their own right. The author draws upon comparative theory within the sociology of childhood, practice insights and three case studies for support. KEY WORDS: DSM-IV-R; rights-based approach; sociology of childhood.

Despite the increased risks and vulnerabilities that children and young people face due to the Coronavirus (covid-19), they are also some of the most active in their participatory responses to this global emergency. Drawing on transdisciplinarity, this paper considers how covid-19 has opened up new spaces and opportunities for the participation of children. For example, young people across the globe have been actively involved in raising digital awareness about covid-19, participating in environmental activism, and engaging in unique educational opportunities. While children and young people are often constructed as vulnerable, innocent and in need of protection, this pandemic reveals that they can transcend these adultist constructs.

Abstract Globally, humans face innumerable socioeconomic, cultural, and environmental problems while being threatened by ever more interconnected and complex geopolitical concerns. In this planetary context, unidisciplinary research and related teaching approaches often work to constrain our ability to move beyond institutional and bureaucratic mind-sets to become agents of social change within local systems impacting children. During its 40-year evolution from a sub-discipline of psychology, the international field of child and youth studies has sought common ground for interpreting these pedagogical and professional issues. Many authors now argue for transdisciplinary approaches to address and overcome these tensions in the effort to re-integrate epistemologies of the global South within more dominant global North knowledge production systems. Such approaches have been posited to add new analytical and methodological tools to achieve praxis—the Greek word for translating theory into practice. Transdisciplinary research transcends the usual gap between academia and the broader public by acknowledging the value of knowledge obtained from diverse, nonacademic stakeholders in the community, government, and business. In addition, these approaches in child and youth studies offer us new possibilities for translating and understanding the local and global implications of implementing the 1989 United Nations Convention on the Rights of Child, and the vast differences in the experiences of childhood amongst and between various socioeconomic, cultural, and political contexts in recognizing their own rights in situ. Moving beyond adult-focused and Eurocentric understanding of the childhood literature (and of children’s human rights), this paper reflects our experiences working with young people affiliated with the Lalitpur Metropolitan City Child Clubs in Nepal, and observing their participatory planning processes for annual budgets. In response to increasing complexity throughout all regions of the world, we consider historical, political, and cultural experiences in Nepal through this transdisciplinary approach to child-centered research and activism. Our paper details key learning and transitions from being “academic researchers” and “observers” of a participatory, child- and youth-focused budgeting process to “collaborators” and “co-constructors of knowledge” with key stakeholders—the young people of Lalitpur, Nepal.

Our chapter presents a thematic analysis of a large, qualitative dataset collected during a two-year “critical ethnography” (Kincheloe & McLaren, 2005, p. 324), at one Ontario, Canada university campus1. As social science researchers in a political and cultural context increasingly viewed with skepticism and dismay throughout the world (Ralston Saul, 2008; Suzuki, 2010), we draw upon epistemological, ontological and methodological approaches from across and outside disciplinary boundaries, including Indigenous frameworks, to introduce and understand our study.

The paper offers a secondary analysis from a grounded theory doctoral study that reconsiders its “grounded systemic design” (Mitchell, 2005, 2007). While theorists across multiple disciplines fiercely debate the ontological implications of Niklas Luhmann’s autopoietic systems theory (Deflem 1998; Graber and Teubner 1998; King and Thornhill 2003; Mingers 2002; Neves 2001; O’Byrne 2003; Verschraegen 2002, for example), few investigators have yet to adopt his core constructs empirically (see Gregory, Gibson and Robinson 2005 for an exception). Glaser’s (1992, 2005) repeated concerns for grounded theorists to elucidate a “theoretical code” has provided an additional entry point into this project of integrating grounded theory with Luhmann’s abstract conceptual thinking about how global society operates. The author argues that this integration of methodology and systems thinking provides an evolution of grounded theory rather than its ongoing “erosion” as Greckhamer and KoroLjungberg (20...

As a contribution towards the UN Decade for Human Rights Education (1995-2004), this qualitative, comparative policy study investigated the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) within the Scottish and Canadian educational systems. The researcher adopted an inductive, grounded methodology which is argued to be most congruent when building theory is the chief aim (Glaser and Strauss, 1967; Glaser, 2005). During 20 months of fieldwork, 50 key informant interviews were obtained in Geneva, New York, Scotland and Canada. The author contends that postmodern thinking has contributed much towards contemporary childhood research, yet an underlying deconstruction of the CRC constrains theoretical development. To address this breakdown of overarching leitmotifs within the social sciences (Esping-Andersen, 2000), the sociology of human rights is utilised as a conceptual framework (Luhmann, 1965, 1982, 1997; Q'Byrne, 2003; Verschraegen, 2002). Furthermore, through the integration of gr...

Life for Inuit communities in Canada’s northern territory of Nunavut has been impacted by rapid change over the past fifty years in particular, a pattern that has similarly impacted First Peoples’ communities across the southern portion of the country for centuries. Unfortunately, inadequate resources often leave young people from Nunavut challenged to safely navigate these abrupt changes within their communities and culture. The chronic lack of resources for young people is compounded by the lack of educational opportunities for Inuit adults to enter professional roles in support of the region’s next generation. As a result, non-Inuit (or Qallunaat) professionals from southern Canada are frequently recruited. This paper examines some of the challenges faced by Inuit communities and Qallunaat professionals as they traverse the North/South divide within a cross-cultural educational context. This process is characterized by struggles and joy in finding the balance between meeting youn...

Adolescents are keenly aware of the importance of social power, leading some to bully others in order to acquire and/or maintain that socialpower. Traditional efforts to understand and prevent adolescent bullying have largely proven to be limited or ineffective. In response to this, researchers have called for a transdisciplinary approach to bullying. Unfortunately, a transdisciplinary approach is challenging to implement, partly because it depends on, and is sometimes constrained by, the successful implementation of civility. We suggest that civility may not only be required for research but may also serve as a key for transdisciplinary efforts to understand and guide adolescents’ use of social power.

The role of Canadian Child Advocates has been under-researched by academics and civil society alike, and the following paper addresses this knowledge deficit with findings from a graduate study (Bendo, 2016) reviewing their legislative and professional roles through a sociology of childhood lens. The aim was to investigate the Canadian Council of Child and Youth Advocates (cccya), and data was derived through a discourse analysis of legal, policy and media documents, and in-depth interviews with five current and former Advocates. This exploratory, qualitative study employed a critical ethnographic methodology, and findings indicate that child advocacy is a complex phenomenon with ample opportunities, although numerous barriers exist hindering the work and affecting the quality of outcomes. The study’s main argument suggests the role of the Advocates is not well understood by Canada’s children, youth or the public at large, and may be hampered by a continued lack of cross-national, m...

ABSTRACT Whether one sees the current wave of globalization as a new ideology obscuring trends that have always accompanied modernity’s colonialist, capitalist expansions, or whether one sees something qualitatively novel, the dilemma for contemporary social scientists is the same – to make sense of what they observe (Weber 2002). This approach sets the tone for a text drawing upon both theory and empiricism with scholars from diverse critical and pedagogical discourses at various stages of their careers, and sadly, one of our number deceased since the work was undertaken in mid-2006 (see Tomaševski 2006b). The themes guiding us were various expressions of institutional, social, legal, political, and personal power, pedagogy and praxis, and clearly, each rests lightly upon highly contested terrain while tethering readers to the shifting ground of an emergent, new discourse (see Appadurai 1996; Apple, Kenway and Singh 2005; Bloch, Kennedy, Lightfoot and Weyenberg 2006; Burbules and Torres 2000; Crossley 2000; Malott 2008; Spring 2006; Stromquist 2000 for additional analyses). Throughout this chapter, our aim is to foster a critical dialogue about what social justice might mean in the context of the many pedagogical perspectives of the whole anthology. Although it is fair to say an exhaustive analysis is beyond the scope of this project, the text presumes to be global in content with individual scholars from Canada, the US, UK, and Europe predominant.

The paper presents a secondary analysis of a large qualitative dataset derived from documentary and policy analyses, participant observations and key informant interviews collected during a two-year "critical ethnography" on one Canadian campus (Mitchell and Moore 2015; see also Kincheloe and McLaren’s excellent elucidation, 2005: 324). The study focused on transdisciplinarity as an organizing principle for educational reform and for researching sustainability science partnerships, and our purpose was to investigate how this 21st century paradigm was being understood and deployed by key stakeholders on our own campus. The impetus for the project emerged from our Freirean standpoint and an initial enthusiasm to take forward our child and youth human rights research by contributing to a new consortium looking broadly at climate change and sustainability studies (Moore and Mitchell 2008, 2009; Mitchell 2011, 2015).

This book contains a selection of papers presented at the International Interdisciplinary Conference on Children’s Rights, which took place on 18–19 May 2006 in Ghent, Belgium and was organised by a Belgian interuniversity research project on children's rights. The Conference aimed to evaluate how the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, more than 15 years after its coming into force, has furthered children’s rights, and to explore the challenges we still face in realising these rights. It did so in particular by creating an open forum where academics could meet and exchange views with other professionals, dealing with children's rights in practice. A wide range of topics is covered in the book, including monitoring of the Children’s Rights Convention, child labour, children’s rights and the family and juvenile justice. The book is meant for academics from various disciplines as well as other actors in the field of children’s rights.

I n 2001, I was the fortunate recipi-ent of two scholarships – one from the Faculty of Human Sciences at Scotland's University of Stirling and the other from Universities UK Overseas Studentship Scheme. These were prima-rily awarded on the basis of my graduate research implementing the principles and provisions of the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) in a Cana-dian healthcare setting. 1 These events also necessitated the end of one phase of my career as counsellor/advocate in a children's mental health facility to em-brace the broader research, practice and advocacy implications that a doctorate in Social Policy might bring. Since my arrival, I've become convinced this na-tion of over five million may have some of the most progressive children's rights initiatives in the global community – it's a veritable hotbed of CRC activity. I have noticed much common sense, as well as innovative thinking supporting the social construction of a fertile envi-ronmen...

This book contains a selection of papers presented at the International Interdisciplinary Conference on Children’s Rights, which took place on 18–19 May 2006 in Ghent, Belgium and was organised by a Belgian interuniversity research project on children's rights. The Conference aimed to evaluate how the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, more than 15 years after its coming into force, has furthered children’s rights, and to explore the challenges we still face in realising these rights. It did so in particular by creating an open forum where academics could meet and exchange views with other professionals, dealing with children's rights in practice. A wide range of topics is covered in the book, including monitoring of the Children’s Rights Convention, child labour, children’s rights and the family and juvenile justice. The book is meant for academics from various disciplines as well as other actors in the field of children’s rights.

The paper offers a secondary analysis from a grounded theory doctoral study that reconsiders its “grounded systemic design” (Mitchell, 2005, 2007). While theorists across multiple disciplines fiercely debate the ontological implications of Niklas Luhmann’s autopoietic systems theory (Deflem 1998; Graber and Teubner 1998; King and Thornhill 2003; Mingers 2002; Neves 2001; O’Byrne 2003; Verschraegen 2002, for example), few investigators have yet to adopt his core constructs empirically (see Gregory, Gibson and Robinson 2005 for an exception). Glaser’s (1992, 2005) repeated concerns for grounded theorists to elucidate a “theoretical code” has provided an additional entry point into this project of integrating grounded theory with Luhmann’s abstract conceptual thinking about how global society operates. The author argues that this integration of methodology and systems thinking provides an evolution of grounded theory - rather than its ongoing “erosion” as Greckhamer and Koro- Ljungberg...

The authors present an overview of rights-based approaches to restorative justice praxis (Moore, 2008; Moore and Mitchell, 2009; 2011, 2012) that draws on findings from one such project in a sample of Canadian schools. Restorative justice practices have emerged in the recent era from their origins in ancient and contemporary Indigenous cultures identified in more than 100 countries worldwide (Van Ness, 2005). Built upon “Indigenous epistemologies” (Arabena, 2008: 2) and a communitarian world view, their original focus is on the fullest participation of community members in rectifying harm, wrongdoing, or crime - including young people involved in offending behaviours. The dataset comprised a systematic review of statutory and policy documents, and qualitative results contributed by 300 participants from 60 schools in 14 rural and urban districts near the city of Toronto. The investigation uncovered barriers to de-colonising restorative justice practices from what Hudson (2006: 29) d...

Until recently, youth have become the great absence regarding matters of citizenship, justice, and democracy. Rarely are young people taken up with the important discourses of freedom and citizenship, especially discourses that transcend national boundaries and academic disciplines. Richard Mitchell and Shannon Moore have put together a brilliant book that not only fills this void, but makes one of the most powerful cases I have read for addressing young people in terms that not only allow them to talk back, be heard, but also to enjoy those rights and freedoms that give democracy a real claim on its ideals and promises. Every educator, parent, student, and all those young people now making their voices heard all over the world should read this book. (Henry A. Giroux) This diverse collection will appeal to students in senior undergraduate and graduate courses looking into the new cosmopolitanism in social policy, citizenship or cultural studies, in child and youth studies, and in po...

The chapter begins with an overview of cultural and historical issues for Canadian citizenship and a comparative analysis of two of that country’s most notorious contemporary child and youth citizens - Nobel nominee and Free the Children activist Craig Kielburger, and Guantánamo prisoner Omar Khadr - both of whom began their journey in Toronto-area elementary schools. The following section moves to a critical review of the contours of an emergent global “assemblage” (Sassen, 2008, p. 5) on child and youth citizenship that argues two main points. First, there remain innumerable untapped potentials for mentoring active, democratic, and critical children’s citizenship within both present and coming generations. Secondly, a transdisciplinary re-theorising of adult-centric citizenship concepts through application of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989) opens up new opportunities for such partnerships from local to global scales.

This paper investigates theoretical and practice intersections in Canada between the principles and provisions of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, and the UN's Basic Principles on the Use of Restorative Justice in Criminal Justice Matters. We undertook this exploratory study from a transdisciplinary standpoint and utilised grounded theory methodological and analytical procedures throughout; data include legal and policy documentary analyses along with eight key informant interviews. Findings indicate that CRC implementation has been impeded by myopic disciplinary approaches that have dissolved its constituent principles by isolating them from its provisions. Young people's human rights are languishing within Canadian juvenile justice contexts, and thus, historical efforts to build an ecosystem of rights-respecting communities in that nation are being compromised. The paper concludes with a reiteration of a CRC implementation model which articulates the balance a...

... human rights (ontology), but simply on how we may obtain knowledge about such rights (epistemology). ... Beyond Quality in Early Childhood Education and Care - Postmodern Perspectives. ... From Children s Services to Children 's Spaces - Public Policy, Children and Childhood. ...

The following exploratory study was conducted in 2005 within Canadian post-secondary institutions for those intending to gain employment within public education for children and related professions. Data are comprised from thirteen interviews and draw upon students and educators from education, child health, and child and youth studies programmes. The researchers adopted a qualitative, grounded theory methodology to analyze documentary themes and those that emerged during theoretical sampling. Although there is variance of opinion, the majority confirm there is a limited theoretical appreciation of the Convention, and of concepts related to 'childhood' with a resultant lack of knowledge within post-secondary education. Interview findings were corroborated by policy analyses and data from non-governmental surveys, the Concluding Observations from the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child, and a contemporaneous parliamentary review undertaken by Canada's Standing Senate ...