Barry Percy-Smith is Professor of Childhood, Youth and Participatory Practice and Director of the Just Futures Research Centre at University of Huddersfield, UK. He has extensive experience as a participatory action researcher and an international reputation for his work in child and youth participation. His main interests are in children and young people as active agents of change, participatory social learning and action inquiry approaches to learning and change in organisations and communities. He has published widely on these issues, including as co-editor of the first edition of A Handbook of Children and Young People’s Participation with Nigel Patrick Thomas. Nigel Patrick Thomas is Professor Emeritus of Childhood and Youth at the University of Central Lancashire and founder of The Centre for Children and Young People’s Participation. He was previously a social work practitioner, manager and advisor and later a social work educator. His research interests are principally in child welfare, children’s rights, children and young people’s participation, and theories of childhood and intergenerational relations. His many publications include Children, Family and the State: Decision-Making and Child Participation (2000, 2002) and Children, Politics and Communication: Participation at the Margins (2009). Claire O’Kane is a child rights practitioner and researcher with over 28 years of international experience working with nongovernment organisations, UN agencies and child-led organisations on children’s rights, participation, care, protection and peacebuilding in development and humanitarian contexts. She is a qualified social worker with a masters in applied social studies and a postgraduate diploma in social research and evaluation from UK universities. Claire works as an international child rights consultant and is a senior associate with Proteknôn. She is the author of more than 60 publications, including toolkits on child rights, protection and participation. Afua Twum-Danso Imoh is Senior Lecturer in Global Childhoods and Welfare at the University of Bristol. Her research interests are centred around conceptualisations of childhood, parent-child relationships and the intersections between dominant global children’s rights discourses and social and cultural norms in West Africa. Afua is the lead co-editor of three other edited collections: Childhoods at the Intersection of the Global and the Local (2012), Children’s Lives in an Era of Children’s Rights: The Progress of the Convention on the Rights of the Child in Africa (Routledge 2013) and Global Childhoods Beyond the North-South Divide (2018).
"'This landmark book reveals how much our understanding of children's right to participate has grown in the twenty years since the launch of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. It is a basic resource for anyone who believes in children's rights and capacities as citizens.' - Roger A. Hart, City University of New York, USA The Handbook will be an essential resource for anyone embarking on a child participation initiative as well as for students and scholars in childhood research and children's rights.' - Martin Woodhead, Open University, UK 'The contributors to this ambitious and extremely accessible volume on children's participation are to be congratulated for their ground-breaking work...The Handbook is an essential read for scholars, policy-makers, practitioners and children's rights advocates.' - Jo Boyden, University of Oxford, UK ""I found this volume very informative and intellectually stimulating. The phenomena described and the issues debated are indeed familiar. This Handbook is well worth a careful reading, and I recommend it with enthusiasm.""--Social Work with Groups"