Dear all,
A few hours before the new year kicks off is a great time to look both back and ahead. What happened for the children’s rights research project in 2017, and what should be the next step?
In short, 2017 was the year of trying to both creating a place at Maastricht University for children’s rights, as well as travelling for field research and sharing research results.
Some of the highlights:
- Finished the research in the Central African Republic, published a research report on the child’s right to education in the CAR and traveled back to share these results
- Gave a key note lecture for about 100 employees of the municipality of Amsterdam who are starting a program to get all children into schools
- Gave lectures for UNICEF, African Study Center, SOAS London (among others) and taught a masterclass about children’s rights
- Published the academic article “Lipstick Law“
- Created, together with artist Daan Draait and Maastricht University, a theater play about the case study in CAR
- Recruited a team of students with whom, in 6 months, we conducted two field researches on the child’s right to nationality and hosted a successful crowdfunding campaign (if you still want to contribute, you can do so here!)
- Won € 3000 in the action research competition
For 2018, the first plan is to write the PhD book and have a first draft ready at the end of the year. But of course that is not nearly enough. Ideally, I also want to:
- Teach 3 university courses (to raise money and teach children’s rights and critical thinking)
- Perform the CAR theater play in different schools and discuss the case with the students
- Be a good mentor for a successful PREMIUM project on children’s rights to education in the Netherlands, in cooperation with NGO Defence for Children
- Publish a research report and travel back to share the results of the third case study
- Raise € 20.000 for the children’s rights research fund
- Publish at least one academic article
- Acquire my University Teacher Qualification
- Start preparing the way for a continuation of children’s rights research after the PhD…
So those are (some of the) plans for 2018. But for now, I want to thank you for making all this work possible, and mostly I want to wish you all a very happy and ambitious New Year!!
