The Rights of the Child: Parenting, Politics, and the Body

Any compassionate person can intuit and observe that young humans require, relative to so-called adults, an extra level of safeguarding against certain environmental hazards, from automobiles to firearms to sexual violence. Yet these are realities and challenges that all societies today are failing to some extent to face—with deadly consequences. One in ten children is sexually abused. Car accidents, homicides, firearm injuries, and suicides claim tens of thousands of juvenile lives in the U.S. alone each year. But the U.S. is also the only country in the world not to have ratified the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. Why is this? Why are “parental rights” deemed almost always absolute? Why is the transgender child, specifically, the site for a consolidation of far-right power on the national and global stages? Are “rights of the child” even a useful framework for securing child well-being? And what might they mean for key social institutions, from the nuclear household to education to norms around race, sex, and gender?

In this course, we will explore both existing and speculative “rights of the child,” while also asking what alternative conceptions one might adopt for advancing youth liberation in solidarity with children themselves. Together, we will study and discuss both popular and academic engagements with the question of rights—e.g., the putative right to play, to participate in politics, to inherit a liveable planet, or to “have” a childhood—looking at theoretic interventions in “critical childhood studies” alongside texts about the history of Youth Liberation struggles in America. Assigned readings will feature, for example, Samantha Godwin’s legal paper “Against Parental Rights,” and the culture critic Andrea Long Chu’s “The Right to Change Sex.”

Course Schedule

Sunday, 2:00-5:00pm ET
February 01 — February 22, 2026
4 weeks

$335.00

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