FC 17
30th Anniversary of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989)
The third plenary session for SHCY's 2019 Conference, "Encounters and Exchanges" hosted at Australian Catholic University in Sydney, Australia. Australian Catholic University has made a split-screen video of the plenary available to view online for the next five years.
If you prefer to listen to the audio for this presentation, you can do so through the SHCY Podcast episode, here. Or browse other episodes of the SHCY podcast, here.
Participants
Megan Mitchell
Megan Mitchell is Australia’s first National Children’s Commissioner at the Australian Human Rights Commission, appointed in 2013.
Megan has previous experience in both government and non-government roles in child protection, out-of-home care, youth justice, disability, and early childhood services. Megan also holds qualifications in social policy, psychology and education.
In her role as Commissioner, Megan focuses solely on the rights and interests of children, and the laws, policies and programs that impact on them.
Each year, Megan presents a statutory report to federal Parliament on the state of children’s rights in Australia. In her work to date, Megan has focused on the prevalence of suicide and intentional self-harm in children and young people, the impact of family and domestic violence on children and young people, the oversight of children and young people in correctional detention, and the experiences and trajectories of young parents and their children.
Sana Nakata
Dr Nakata is a Torres Strait Islander and Lecturer in Political Science, ARC 
Discovery Indigenous Research Fellow and co-Director of the Indigenous Settler Relations Collaboration at the School of Social and Political Sciences, The University of Melbourne. She is trained as a lawyer and political theorist, with specific interest in how children appear in and made sense of within political debates. Her first book, Childhood Citizenship, Governance and Policy (Routledge, 2015) explored this through Enlightenment political thought and contemporary debates about citizenship, criminality and sexuality. Her current ARC Discovery Indigenous grant investigates ‘Representations of Children in Australian Political Controversies’ with specific attention to representations of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children, and child asylum seekers, and the implications of these representations for children, politics and the Australian nation.
Nanette Louchart-Fletcher
Nanette is Creative Producer – Families & Young People, Museum of Australian Democracy at Old Parliament House, Canberra (MoAD) and is part of the Play Act Activation Network. She has developed a permanent children’s exhibition around the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.
Isobelle Barrett Meyering
Dr Isobelle Barrett Meyering joined Macquarie University in 2018. Her current research project, ‘Contested Childhoods: A History of Children’s Rights in Australia (1959-2013)’, explores how debates over children’s rights have shaped political, social and cultural life across a period of almost sixty years.
Isobelle's previous research focused on the history of Australian feminism, childhood and the family. Her PhD, which she completed at UNSW in 2017, examined ‘children’s liberation’ as a component of Australian feminist politics in the 1970s. She has published work on a range of aspects of Australian feminism, including feminist parenting practices, lifestyle politics and backlash movements. She is currently secretary of Oral History New South Wales and a member of the Children’s Research Network at Macquarie University. She was also a founding member of the editorial collective for History in the Making, a national online journal for history students first published in 2012.