(Re)constructing equality, diversity, and inclusion in Chinese childhoods: intersectional perspectives and transdisciplinary approaches

Although the universalisation of the UNCRC since 1989 tends to be perceived as a landmark for international consensus on realising children's rights to dignity, development and participation, evidence suggests that inequality, exclusion and social injustice in childhoods continue to prevail across the globe (Clark et al., 2020; Lareau, 2011). Groups of children's lives, opportunities and access to provision and services are deprived by a range of barriers relating to diversity issues such as gender, disability, migration, ethnicity and socioeconomic status (Konstantoni and Emejulu, 2017). In recent years, the UN Sustainable Development Goals have been influential in highlighting the crucial interdependence of equity and sustainability (Minujin and Ferrer, 2016), reiterating the necessity to seek effective, collective and transformative solutions to unfairness, crisis and divide in human societies. Nevertheless, despite that children's welfare has been considered in both contexts of the UNCRC and the SDGs, researchers raised concerns over issues in international policies such as the invisibility of children's roles and contributions (Croke et al., 2021) and the risk of reproducing discrimination and exclusion against certain groups (Davis and Watson, 2000). In particular, while much research has been conducted in the Global North contexts where a discourse of children’s rights and equality tends to be more present in social policies, considerably less is heard about children's lives from disadvantaged backgrounds in the Global South (Singal and Muthukrishna, 2014). These issues not only add to the misrepresentation of global childhoods to differ mainstream images of children being white, middle-class, able-bodied and heterosexual (Curran and Runswick-Cole, 2014; Dyer, 2016; Kehily, 2010), but also the underrepresentation of local knowledge connected with cultural wisdom (Moore et al., 2005).