Turning Global Rights into Local Realities

Afua Twum-Danso Imoh is Associate Professor in Global Childhoods and Welfare at the University of Bristol.

“In this book, Afua Twum-Danso Imoh offers a sharp critique of the obsession with deficit childhoods of much of the academic literature on childhood in the Global South. She argues passionately for the need of a holistic approach that recognizes childhood and children’s rights as a continuum, a gradation of sorts which reflects a plurality of childhoods and a diversity of lived realities which intersect variously with dominant rights discourses. This is a must-read book for all who wish to understand how biased and partial knowledge about children’s lives and children’s rights in the Global South ends up limiting our capacity to see the world in all its nuance and complexity.” Spyros Spyrou, European University Cyprus

• Introduction1. Tracing the Western Origins of Global Children’s Rights Discourses 2. From the National to the International: The Makings of the Global Discourse of Children’s Rights3. Global Children’s Rights Discourses: Imperialistic, Irrelevant, and Inapplicable to Southern Contexts?4. Historical Approaches to Child Welfare in Ghana5. From Marginal to Central: Tracing the Deployment of Children’s Rights Language in Laws and Action in Ghana6. Exploring the Multiplicity of Childhoods and Child Rearing Practices in a Pluralistic Society and the Implications for Children’s Rights7. The Plurality of Childhoods and the Significance for Rights Discourses: An Exploration of Child Duty and Work Against a Backdrop of Social Inequality8. Implications of the Pluralities of Childhood Conceptualizations and Lived Experiences in the Global South for Studies of Children’s Rights