脰zlem Lakatos
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脰zlem Lakatos is a social scientist with an interdisciplinary background oriented towards international affairs and human rights. She is currently a Visiting Research Fellow at the Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies, City AV短视频 of New York.
She is pursuing a PhD titled:
"Girl Child, Girls, Girls' Rights? The Making of the Category of Girls at the United Nations: Another History of Children's Rights (1989 to Today)."
This doctoral research provides a genealogical analysis of the category "girls," framing it both as a historical object of investigation and as a target for analytical deconstruction. Positioned at the intersection of gender studies and childhood studies, it examines the historical, discursive, and institutional conditions that enabled the emergence and construction of this category within the United Nations' child rights framework 鈥� a field normatively and symbolically dominated by the Committee on the Rights of the Child and UNICEF.
Drawing on a rich corpus of UN archives, grey literature, field observations at UN headquarters in Geneva and New York, and 44 interviews with key actors, the study analyzes the practices, discourses, actors, and events that shape this category. It highlights the tensions and negotiations between various stakeholders and fields of expertise (e.g., women鈥檚 rights, development) as well as the circulation of actors promoting the category of girls across different spaces (civil society, states, the UN).
The evolution of this category is accompanied by dominant representations 鈥� sexualized and racialized鈥攖hat structure UN discourses. The study identifies three main paradigms: the victim (dominant in the 1990s), the agent of change (emerging in the 2000s), and the heroine (prominent since the 2010s). These successive and overlapping representations reflect the discursive transformations surrounding the category of girls within the UN child rights field.
This PhD research is co-supervised by Prof. Delphine Gardey (Institute for Gender Studies) and Prof. Michelle Cottier (Faculty of Law).
Research interest:
- Gender and Childhood Studies
- UN; International Organizations
- Children鈥檚 Rights; Girls鈥� Rights; Women鈥檚 Rights
- Representations and Discourses
- Foucault鈥檚 Archaeological and Genealogical Methodologies
- Qualitative methods (archives, interviews, observations)
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