Turning the UNCRC upside down: A bottom-up perspective on children's rights

Children's rights have been studied from several perspectives. The implementation of children's rights has been argued in a corpus of seminal works seeking to problematise ways in which rights may be integrated and visible, with a particular focus on children's participation. Research also exists in the areas of policy, democratic practice and methodological considerations, particularly in the field of early childhood education. Although the obligation to realise children's rights has been repeatedly argued in the literature, there are few (if any) studies that have examined rights from the child perspective as seen through the lens of their everyday experiences of life. This paper will present some of the significant early findings around a potential disjunction between rhetorical rights and lived rights. The authors will argue that the implementation and action around children's rights should be positioned from a bottom-up perspective, rather than constrained to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child Articles.