Focal point: Deepak Kumar Behera
beheradk@gmail.com

Better knowledge and understanding of the everyday lives of children in Asia-Pacific countries, starting from the premise that children are social actors

• An holistic, integrated and multi-disciplinary debate on the experiences, activities and constructions of Asia-Pacific childhoods;
• Knowledge and understanding of the impact of global and local developments on children's everyday lives;
• Concepts for childhood studies based on Asia-Pacific realities
• Documentation of existing literatures and discourses on children in Asia-Pacific countries;
• Mapping of existing literatures and discourses on children in Asia-Pacific countries.

Organised international concern for the wellbeing of children as a vital segment of the global population has developed relatively recently. The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, which entered into force in 1990, is a marker of this concern, but may be more reflective of Western notions of what an ideal childhood should be than of non-Western systems of knowledge and practice relating to children and youth. Still less is the UN ideal realised in full for any but a small number of privileged children. Although children are social actors to some degree in all societies, what they do as agents of social maintenance and socio-cultural change has been little noted by scholars and policy makers. Children have suffered most from the negative effects of globalisation, such as increased poverty and violence, and yet the burden of responsibility for coping with all the changes falls on their shoulders. Through the results of ethnographic research, this symposium hopes to render these children and their worlds more visible and to understand how they meet the challenges they currently face.

• Considering the impact of ‘Asian values' debates for understanding the concept of childhood in different countries:
  • Situation analysis of the status and roles of children;
  • Children's activities: children as social actors in different settings and in their everyday experiences of family, school and other places of learning, out-of-school, play, work, peer group, community and so forth, including quality-of-life indicators;
• Responses of children and youth as social actors to global and local forces;
• Creativity, competence and indigenous knowledge.

The emphasis will be on presenters who have carried out ethnographic research with children in Asia-Pacific communities, although there will be some speakers on cultural relativity from the human rights community, in order to explore what international children's rights standards mean in local contexts.

• Publication of selected papers;
• The basis for undergraduate and postgraduate courses for students on children in Asia-Pacific contexts;
• Documentation of existing literatures and discourses on children in Asia-Pacific countries;
• Discourse between Western and Asia-Pacific scholars on the concept of Asia-Pacific childhood.