Conference Program

Childhood can be understood as a permanent social structure (Qvortrup, 2004), historically and culturally situated, whose meanings are produced and transformed through discourses, practices, and institutional dispositives (Foucault, 1976; Robinson, 2013). From this perspective, childhood is not a natural state, but a discursive construction through which children’s access to knowledge is regulated and their bodies and subjectivities are governed. Within this framework, the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC, 1989) represents a crucial epistemic and political turning point, as it recognises children as rights-bearing subjects in the present rather than as adults-in-the-making or future citizens (Macinai, 2013; Qvortrup, 2008). As an international human rights treaty, the UNCRC is not neutral. However, in its interpretation and implementation, it contributes to the stabilisation of a normative image of childhood.

In this context, this paper highlights how the UNCRC is grounded in an exclusively age-based approach (Frödén & Quennerstedt, 2020), which has contributed to overlooking and marginalising other forms of injustice and oppression affecting children. In doing so, it reproduces the myth of the universal child (Davis & Marsh, 2022), which operates as a regulatory parameter, obscuring other forms of oppression, such as race, social class, gender, sexuality and ability.

In close continuity with this dynamic, the myth of the universal child tends to consolidate itself through the construction of childhood as innocent (Robinson, 2008, 2013). If universality abstracts childhood into an apparently neutral and homogeneous figure – one that reflects Western, white, and colonial imaginaries – innocence provides its moral foundation by constructing the child as naturally pure and in need of protection from everything related to gender and sexuality. The construct of innocence reproduces the boundaries between what is considered appropriate or inappropriate, sayable or unsayable, educable or dangerous for children. Precisely because it presents itself as an unquestionable moral truth, innocence operates as a regulatory technology that desexualises childhood and contributes to the production of the normative adult citizen-subject through early processes of heteronormalisation (Robinson, 2008, 2013; Colli Vignarelli, 2025).

In this sense, universality and innocence are conceptualised as technologies of childhood governance that render childhoods deviating from these norms less intelligible and legitimate. Therefore, adopting a queer and decolonial perspective could contribute to the deconstruction of the binary and heteronormative norms that regulate bodies and subjectivities from early childhood, while challenging the homogenising universalism that obscures historical, cultural and material differences. This approach can critically subvert and re-signify children’s rights and the very idea of childhood, thereby opening space for the plural recognition and epistemic legitimisation of all childhoods.