The paper extends the critique in earlier research of human rights as exclusive of otherness and difference by introducing the work of Adriana Cavarero (2000) on a narratable self. Hence, the formation of human rights is thus about the relations between different narratable selves, not just Western ones. A narrative learning, drawing on Cavarero (2000), shifts the focus in human rights learning from learning about the other to exposing one’s life story narrative through relationality.

This book is the first to comprehensively develop the concept of childism to understand, study and analyse age-based discrimination against children.

It presents a critical theory to help comprehend intersecting prejudice against children and to examine the weak implementation of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), and in what ways violations against children can be analysed through the intersections of racist, sexist and ableist discrimination. The book further offers scholars a new perspective when studying structural forms of discrimination and oppression against children and provides professionals with a new vocabulary on prejudice targeting children when assessing theory, policy and praxis on ‘child-friendly’ and ‘child-centred’ initiatives that overlook the need to protect children against discrimination.

This book will be of key interest to scholars, students and practitioners of human rights, child and youth studies, education, prejudice studies, the United Nations and child law, and more broadly to sociology, social policy, psychology, and social work.

The concept of childism is, in this chapter, used primarily as a theoretical approach to analyse adult resistance against the realisation of children’s rights. Childism can help us to understand children’s exposure to negative prejudices, attitudes and discriminatory structures in society. This chapter argues, that in order to address discrimination against children on a systemic level, a critical approach in child rights studies on negative beliefs against children is needed to illuminate prejudice ingrained in the ways in which policies and laws are formulated on a structural level. By studying discourses that lead to abuse of children we may better understand underlying reasons to the challenges facing a respect for children’s rights internationally. Reasons and arguments given for why children are denied basic rights and freedoms can be systematically examined over time by addressing how adult’s prejudice about children lead to age-based discrimination against children. These intersectional understandings of subordination may inform affirmative policy needed for realising the rights of the child. The chapter calls for further empirical studies that interrelate violations of children’s rights with different overlapping forms of prejudice and discrimination against children.

Whereas educational policy is mainly concerned with the content of Human Rights Education (HRE), philosophers of education have widely explored the subject and her social condition in terms of social justice education. This thesis draws on philosophers of education in exploring the subject rather than the content of HRE, focusing the study on ontological rather than epistemological aspects of learning. In this thesis learning is explored through narratives, as a relational process of becoming. The turn to narrative is taken against the dominant historical narrative of human rights as a Western project. This turn concerns how claims toward universalism of human rights exclude difference and equally concerns how notions of particularity overshadows the uniqueness in life stories. The concept of uniqueness serves to elucidate the complexity of the subject, not easily reduced into social categorizations, a concept drawn from Adriana Cavarero and Hannah Arendt.

What one decides fi t for appearance through writing and speech bears a political signifi cance that risk being distorted through both language, reception in the public, and through calls for gendered representations. How can work of female philosophers be interpreted as a concern for the world from that of having to respond to a male-dominated discourse through which speech becomes trapped into what one might represent as ‘other’? In this paper, I explore the public reception of two female thinkers who question, in diff erent ways, the domi-nant notion of the author or philosopher as a male subject; what kind of limitations does the relative notion of ‘female’ pose political action, and how can privilege constitute a hindrance to feminist solidarity?

This chapter explores the alliances and conflicts between different feminist and socialist fractions within the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) and the international organizations with representatives at its third session in Beirut, Lebanon in 1949. In the meetings of the CSW, the early Cold War tensions both hindered and foregrounded not only the rights of working women in the West but the comparatively rights-less status of women workers in colonial territories. Among the human rights advanced by international welfare feminism in 1949 included the important notion of equal pay for women. The CSW heralded increased dissent between different position-holders on women’s right to equal pay in a time when millions of women had been laid off following the Second World War but these tensions should not be reduced to East-West ideological battles alone. This chapter situates the year that followed the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) relative to international welfare feminist history.

The article is based on a critical cosmopolitan outlook on dialogue as not aimed at reaching consensus, but rather keeping dialogue of difference open, with the ability to reach common understanding of human rights on conflicting grounds. Intersectional dialogue is used as a concept that opens up possibilities to study, in a pragmatic sense, the ‘cosmopolitan space’ in which different axles of power met in the historical drafting of human rights. By enacting analysis of United Nations (UN) documents from 1948 on the process of drafting the Universal Declaration on Human Rights (UDHR) the conceptualization of intersectional dialogue is put to work. The utopian foundation for deliberative democracy as dialogue in the absence of power and interest does not acknowledge the reality in which the human rights were negotiated and debated. The paper questions the dominant narrative of a western philosophical ground for the universality of human rights.

By problematizing how morality is discussed in cosmopolitan education without addressing the rightlessness of non-citizens I draw on thoughts by Martha Nussbaum and Marianna Papastephanou on how human rights and agency can be reclaimed through a critical cosmopolitanism. Educational philosophy on cosmopolitan education presupposes the juridical right to education. Due to this presupposition, the subject who is excluded by legal limitations of rights is not necessarily addressed by morally conceptualizations of cosmopolitanism and education. This paper seeks to investigate this gap by asking what significance cosmopolitanism and philosophy have for the rightlessness, drawing on the problematization by Hannah Arendt on the limitations of the human rights project. The concept of phronesis is invoked in order to stress the importance for cosmopolitan educationalists to theorize the non-citizen and to address those who are excluded from the legal right to education.

Human rights are today criticized as not compatible with different cultural values and the debate has circulated around Asian values and Islamic values as in dichotomy with human rights as universal ethics (Ignatieff, 2003). The theoretical dichotomy between universality and particularity is questioned pragmatically in this paper through a historical study. The working process of drafting the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) in 1946-48, which included thousands of people, is explored as a cosmopolitan space in which individuals from different cultural contexts met to negotiate human rights through cultural narratives. The process where particular values were negotiated with universal notion on human rights resulted in a common proclamation (UDHR) without a common philosophical or ideological ground. This paper puts forth a thesis that human rights discourse can work as a cosmopolitan space, in which particular value systems meet in processes characterized by conflict and cohesion. Hence human rights can be understood as a master narrative compatible with different conflicting cultural narratives (Gibson & Somers, 1994).

Human Rights Education (HRE) has traditionally been articulated in terms of cultivating better citizens or world citizens. The main preoccupation in this strand of HRE has been that of bridging a gap between universal notions of a human rights subject and the actual locality and particular narratives in which students are enmeshed. This preoccupation has focused on ‘learning about the other’ in order to improve relations between plural ‘others’ and ‘us’ and reflects educational aims of national identity politics in citizenship education. The article explores the learning of human rights through narratives in relations, drawing on Hannah Arendt and Sharon Todd. For this re-thinking of relations in learning human rights, the article argues that HRE needs to address both competing historical narratives on the drafting of the Universal Declaration on Human Rights (UDHR) as well as unique life narratives of learners.

Epistemic injustice in human rights education can be found in a colonial historical trajectory of human rights that rests on accounts of western agency only. Such narratives overshadow the legacy of Indian and Pakistani freedom fighters and Latin American feminists who negotiated human rights against colonial, patriarchal and racist discourses after the Second World War. Without their contribution a United Nations rights concept risked being limited to a western trajectory of the ‘Rights of Man’ that represents a monistic universalism. This chapter revisits the history of the United Nations, unearthing historical counternarratives of what a pluralistic universalism of human rights means by adding knowledge about postcolonial feminist subjects who spoke of a positive conception that could reduce injustice.

Epistemic injustice in human rights education (HRE) can be found in a colonial historical trajectory of human rights that rests on accounts of western agency only. Such narratives overshadow the legacy of Indian and Pakistani freedom fighters and Latin American feminists who negotiated human rights against colonial, patriarchal and racist discourses after the Second World War. Without their contribution a United Nations (UN) rights concept risked being limited to a western trajectory of the ‘Rights of Man’ that represents a monistic universalism. The paper revisits the history of the United Nations, unearthing historical counternarratives of what a pluralistic universalism of human rights means by adding knowledge about postcolonial feminist subjects who spoke of a positive conception that could reduce injustice. 

School and education can be seen as an extension of the home as Hannah Arendt stresses, where children are protected in a space in which they can learn and grow, a space that is not yet public. This distinction of education as “not yet public” can be seen in contrast to John Dewey who explores notions of democracy as a process in education, where education and school is regarded as a mini society. This paper explores several challenges with progressive education and, specifically, of human rights education, through the work of Arendt (1959) and Dewey (1990) on the notions of responsibility and children’s human rights. Where do we as educators draw the distinction between taking responsibility of raising awareness of global injustices and human rights violations with the next generation without falling pray to dissolution that the gap between political imaginary and reality faces us with, or risking violating children’s “safe space” in school that according to Arendt should be a space that is neither private nor public, but a free zone for thinking and learning with others? Do we bring into the classroom discrimination and segregation by drawing on social categorizations with the pretext of questioning the same on the basis of “equal rights”? If ethical and relational dimensions of education are to be taken seriously then human rights education is a risky practice since it involves children’s sense of being and it raises questions that may not be dealt with properly or solvable for the children exposed.

This paper distinguishes Swedish feminist internationalists in the early Cold War years appointed to high positions at the United Nations (UN) whose political commitments were connected to pluralism, democracy, and a solidarity with the poor. Alva Myrdal, Agda Rössel, and Ulla Lindström were three Swedish women appointed some of the highest positions attained by women in the UN in the late 1940s and 1950s. Their stance on the interrelatedness of women’s political and economic rights is in this paper read as characteristic of the Swedish Middle Way. A special focus in the paper is on the parliamentarian debates regarding the Swedish Middle Way in which Ulla Lindström expounded on her experiences from her work as delegate to the UN. Human rights actualized by feminist internationalists included equal pay for women supported by working unions, preschool and day-care facilities for working mothers, as well as social security and social services for families in poverty, but the high-ranking positions of these women at the UN were questioned both domestically and within the UN.

There is a globalization trend in teacher education, emphasizing the role of teachers to make judgments based on human rights in their teaching profession. Rather than emphasizing the epistemological dimension of acquiring knowledge about human rights through teacher education, an ontological dimension is emphasized in this paper of what it means to become a professional teacher. An ontological dimension of ‘learning to become’ can be captured in critical examination of a cosmopolitan awareness of teachers in relation to judgment and justice. I read the critique through studies on human rights in teacher education, which transforms notions of openness and respect in relations marked by difference.

Who were the non-Western women delegates who took part in the drafting of the United Nations Charter and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) from 1945-1948? Which member states did these women represent, and in what ways did they push for a more inclusive language than "the rights of Man" in the texts? This book provides a gendered historical narrative of human rights from the San Francisco Conference in 1945 to the final vote of the UDHR in the United Nations General Assembly in December 1948. It highlights the contributions by Latin American feminist delegates, and the prominent non-Western female representatives from new member states of the UN.

In this paper we conduct a poststructural discourse analysis inspired by Carol Bacchi’s ‘What’s the problem represented to be?’ (WRP) approach. We explore what kinds of problems are formulated in preschool educational policy on multilingualism, and what underlying assumptions underlie the dominant discourse on language proficiency in Sweden. Serving as a case to discuss how racism, ableism and childism intersect with linguicism, we examine the importance of shifting from a ‘children’s (special) needs’ discourse to a ‘children’s (language) rights’ discourse through a social justice education framework.   We draw upon Elisabeth Young-Bruehl’s understanding of childism, which refers to prejudice and discrimination against children based on beliefs about their inferiority to adults. The right to and rights in education are constituent upon linguistic rights, upon students learning to use their first language, whether that be minority, indigenous or sign language.

Do children suffer from discriminatory structures in society and how can issues of social injustice against children be conceptualised and studied? The conceptual frame of childism is examined through everyday expressions in the aftermath of policies affecting children in Sweden, the UK and Ireland to develop knowledge of age-based and intersectional discrimination against children. While experiences in Sweden seem to indicate that young children rarely suffer severe symptoms from covid-19, or constitute a driving force in spreading the virus, policy decisions in the UK and Ireland to close down schools have had detrimental effects on children in terms of child hunger and violence against children. Policy decisions that have prioritised adults at the cost of children have unveiled a structural injustice against children, which is mirrored by individual examples of everyday societal prejudice.

In this article, we explore the role of film in educational settings and argue that testimony and narrative are dependent upon each other for developing ethical judgments. We use the film 12 Angry Men to enhance our thesis that the emotional response that sometimes is intended in using film as testimonies in classrooms requires a specific listening; a listening that puts pupils at risk when they relate testimonies to their own life narratives. The article raises the importance of listening in training narrative ethos in relation to violence witnessed in film. The article contributes by enhancing an understanding of a relational dimension to testimony and narrative, which, in an Arendtian sense, is also put forward as a political relation.

How can human rights for children born outside their national jurisdiction with parents deemed as terrorists be safeguarded? In what ways do children risk being discriminated in their welfare rights in Sweden when treated as invisible part of a family? How can we do research on children’s rights in not just ethically sensitive ways but also with respect for children as rights subjects? And what could be a theory on social justice for children? These are questions discussed in studies from different disciplines concerning children’s international human rights, with a special focus on the realization of the CRC in Sweden.

This book provides a critical history of influential women in the United Nations and seeks to inspire empowerment with role models from bygone eras.

The women whose voices this book presents helped shape UN conventions, declarations, and policies with relevance to the international human rights of women throughout the world today. From the founding of the UN up until the Latin American feminist movements that pushed for gender equality in the UN Charter, and the Security Council Resolutions on the role of women in peace and conflict, the volume reflects on how women delegates from different parts of the world have negotiated and disagreed on human rights issues related to gender within the UN throughout time. In doing so it sheds new light on how these hidden historical narratives enrich theoretical studies in international relations and global agency today. In view of contemporary feminist and postmodern critiques of the origin of human rights, uncovering women’s history of the United Nations from both Southern and Western perspectives allows us to consider questions of feminism and agency in international relations afresh.

The role of women in the history of the United Nations should be seen in the context of emerging and re-emerging debates in International History and International Relations. A cartoon of the problem characterizes international history as lacking in theoretical self-consciousness and fearful of the contamination of contemporary relevance to policy and social practice. International Relations on the other hand is beset by increasingly reified theories distant from empiricism. The role of international feminism during the early Cold War period has been simplified in earlier accounts as mired in dichotomies obscuring links between welfarism and feminism on the one hand and internationalism and feminism on the other. One of the important insights of the emerging literature on global governance and multilateralism is what Acharya has called the “pluralization of agency”. Agency should not be equated with states, or organized non-state actors, but also individual women and men.

The article contains a text analysis of two papers presented by professionals at an adult education course. The analysis was preformed using biographical approach, examining the intersections between learning and breaking down (of old perceptions and physical defenses). The aim of the study is to explore the question of what makes us learn in the process of questioning what we already think we know. The methods used involved a qualitative analysis of secondary data. Through the analysis we can see that biography in learning enables learners to explore their narrative with both emotional and practical knowledge. Moreover, it may trigger change and lead to a process of new learning as long as a facilitator who acknowledges the sentences that hold information of transformation is present.

Human beings as imperfect rational beings face continuous challenges, one of them has to do with the lack of recognizing and respecting our inner dignity in present times. In this collective paper, we address the overall theme—Philosophy of Education in a New Key (see Peters et al., 2020) from various perspectives related to dignity. We address in particular some of the constraints and possibilities with regard to this issue in various settings such as education and society at large. Klas Roth discusses, for example, that it is not uncommon that the value of human beings has to do with their price in, inter alia, their social, cultural, political and economic settings throughout the world. He argues that such a focus does not necessarily draw attention to the inner dignity of human beings, but that human beings ought to do so in education and society at large. Lia Mollvik discusses views of inner and outer dignity, and argues that there needs to be a balance in between them, and that the balance ought to be acknowledged in education. Rama Alshoufani discusses the classification of human beings in terms of various diagnoses related to the asserted dysfunction of the brain, and she argues that such classification does paradoxically not necessarily respect people with such diagnoses as ends in themselves. On the contrary, she argues that their inner dignity is not respected, but that it should be. Other such failures are due to the lack of inner dignity when it comes to Children’s rights as discussed by Rebecca Adami, and to the lack of recognition of human beings’ vulnerability as discussed by Katy Dineen. Fariba Majlesi criticizes a too strong emphasis on substantive notions of humanist education, which seem to hinder new ways of thinking; she argues that it is necessary to acknowledge the latter in and through education in order to preserve the dignity of human beings. Dignity, it is argued throughout the paper, has an inner moral worth, and is beyond price.