The Role of Academia in Promoting Child Rights

Overview and Context of the Conference

International Hellenic University established in partnership with UNICEF Greece Country Office a Child Rights Centre in December 2024. The Child Rights Centres initiative builds upon the powerful role of Academia to promote and mainstream child rights in society through establishing knowledge hubs within universities that serve this purpose. In the context of this initiative, an international conference on the Role of “Academia in Promoting Child Rights” is co-organized by UNICEF Greece Country Office and International Hellenic University on June 4th and 6th 2026.

The conference aims to facilitate the exchange of international and national experiences and best practices on how academia can effectively promote and protect child rights, with a focus on diverse international perspectives. It will bring together members of the academic community, representatives from UNICEF and other United Nations agencies, child rights experts, practitioners, policymakers, officials from central and local government, various Civil Society Organizations, as well as children and young people themselves. This broad spectrum of stakeholder participation reflects the belief that every sector of society plays a vital role in upholding and fostering a culture of respect for child rights, which, over time, can drive shifts in social norms to the benefit of children.

Considering that since the adoption of the CRC child rights have emerged as an autonomous interdisciplinary scientific field, the conference is adopting this strategy to promote a comprehensive, integrated, and complementary approach to advancing child rights. For this reason, submissions relevant to the conference topic from various disciplines are encouraged such as law, sociology, philosophy, pedagogy, childhood studies, psychology, social work, political science, humanities, anthropology, health sciences, economics, demography, and information science. In addition, thematic areas of focus relevant to child rights are highly welcome such as environment and climate change, child rights and business, child rights in the digital space, gender, disability, disaster, conflict, and displacement.

Key Objectives and Themes of Conference

They include:

• Highlight the pivotal role of Academia in promoting child rights and how to place them into the academic agenda at international and national level
• Networking on academic experience in the field of child rights and sharing the model of “Child Rights Centres” implemented in Greece;
• Demonstrate the benefits of strengthening the role of Academia in promoting child rights for implementing the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child;

Exchange of international good practices and experience in the areas of:

• engagement and partnerships at local and international level for the promotion of child rights;
• evidence generation with a focus on concrete examples of evidence-based policy making for children;
• integrating child rights in the university curricula; engagement of academia with the private sector and business for the promotion and protection of child rights;

Call for Abstracts

The Conference Speakers

Prof. Maria Tsitiridou
International Hellenic University, Greece

Maria is a Professor at the International Hellenic University (IHU), Department of Early Childhood Education & Care. She is also an Honorary Research Fellow at the Department of Education, University of Oxford where she worked for 18 years until the end of April 2018 http://www.education.ox.ac.uk/research/fell/. She is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. Her research has focused on the evaluation of early childhood interventions; the development of children at risk of educational underachievement; the language and literacy development in early years; parenting education and support; the effects of home learning environment; early years professional development; and the role of evidence-based practices in education. Her methodological expertise covers longitudinal studies, quasi-experimental designs, mixed methods, and systematic reviews. She has published more than 70 papers and reports and has a citation index of more than 1400. Since the beginning of her academic career, she received more than £5,000, 000 in her role as Principal Investigator, co-investigator, and researcher in more than 25 research projects. She supervised to completion 14 doctoral theses. She frequently reviews papers for national and international journals. She reviews research grant applications and end-of-award reports.

Prof. Paroula Naskou-Perraki
University of Macedonia, Greece

Dr. H.c. Paraskevi (Paroula ) Naskou-Perraki is a retired Professor of International Law. She studied at the Law School of Aristotle University, postgraduate studies at Chicago, the Hague Academy of International Law, Strasbourg University, Mondovi, Italy, and the Aristotle Law School Master’s programme. Her doctoral thesis was presented at the Law School of Komotini, where she served from 1974 to 1993. From 1994 to 2014, she was teaching at the Department of International and European Studies, University of Macedonia, where she created an UNESCO Chair on Intercultural Policy and ThessISMUN (Thessaloniki International Student Model United Nations). In 2007, the Regional Information Office of the United Nations offered her the title “Friend of the United Nations” (F.U.N.). She researched in many Universities in Greece, Europe USA, and others. She represented Greece in many European conferences, in Iran and China and she was honored as Dr. Honore Causa of the Department of Law and History of Neophit Rilsky University of Blagoevgrad, Bulgaria. She served as an ad hoc Judge at the European Court of Human Rights. She has published Books, Monographs and articles in Greek, English, and French. She is Editor of Evrigenis Yearbook of International and European Law since 2019, (EvriΗYIEL),. Member of scientific associations. President of the Institute of Balkan Studies, Secretary of the Center of European Economic Law, a member of the Scientific Council of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Dr Vassiliki Pliogou
University of Western Macedonia, Greece
Dr. Vassiliki Pliogou is an Associate Professor in Pedagogy and Applications in Education at the Department of Early Childhood Education in the School of Social Sciences and Humanities of the University of Western Macedonia. She is the Director of the Laboratory of the Pedagogical Studies and Innovative Educational Practices, the ERASMUS Departmental Coordinator, and the Placement Departmental Coordinator. Her research interests focus on human rights education, childhood and children’s rights, citizenship, gender, family-school connection and educational implementations using different pedagogical tools in various formal and non-formal educational contexts.

Dr Evgenia Theodotou
University of East London, U.K.
Dr Evgenia Theodotou is a Senior Lecturer in Early Childhood Studies at School of Childhood and Social Care at the University of East London, a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, and a Parent Governor at Amadeus Primary Academies Trust. She has been an external examiner for undergraduate and Research degrees in a few universities since 2016, and a programme leader for Undergraduate and Postgraduate degrees since 2012. She holds a 1st class Diploma in Infant and Child Care Assistant from Sivitanidios College, a 1st class BA (Hons) in Early Childhood Education and Care from the University (TEI) of Athens, an MA in Education from Durham University, and an MSc in Teaching Technology and Digital Systems from the University of Piraeus with Distinction. Her PhD is from the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens in the research area of “Literacy skills in the early years settings,” and she was awarded a Distinction. She has more than 10 years of professional experience as a head teacher in the Early Years Settings, and she is teaching in Higher Education as a Lecturer/Visiting Lecturer in Early Childhood Studies since 2010. She has received external funding to support the local communities with her art projects and the experience of undergraduate students in universities. She has created the ‘Play and Learn through the Arts’ and ‘Dancing with Dr. E’ project that has received international recognition. Her research activity is focused on literacy, the arts, creativity, and technology-enhanced learning. She has participated in several research projects and published her research in International Conferences, journals, edited books, and monographs. She is the author of “When I play I learn…and I better understand” from Delta publications and of “Creativity in the era of New Technologies” from Kritiki publications. She has been a member of several Scientific Review Committees and organised several special sessions in International Conferences.

Dr Dina Kapetangianni
North Texas University, U.S.A.
Dina Kapetangianni is a Principal Lecturer in the Department of Linguistics at the University of North Texas where she teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in linguistic analysis, morpho-syntax, language acquisition and ESL pedagogy. Her research work focuses on the study of grammatical properties of human languages that lie at the interface of morphology, syntax and semantics, such as sentential complementation, word order, agreement and case. She is also interested in how learners acquire these complex morpho-syntactic features in both L1 and L2.

The Conference Schedule

Information will soon be available

Expected Outcomes of the Conference

The overarching expected outcome of the conference is to foster greater understanding about the potential that Academia has in promoting child rights to empower and support universities to strengthen the mainstreaming of child rights into their work and activities.

More specifically, the expected outcomes of the conference include:

• The publication of a conference report to be used as point of reference for the most modern “state of the art” about the role of Academia in promoting child rights;
• To provide implementable practices to the universities for integrating child rights as a cross-cutting dimension of teaching in their curricula;
• To enhance the extroversion of universities for promoting child rights through partnerships with social actors in their local environment;
• To support and empower universities to initiate, better plan, contextualize, and disseminate research activities on children that will be actively utilized in policy making;
• To provide state authorities, EU and UN agencies as well as EU University Associations with a better understanding about the role of academia in upholding child rights to channel the required focus and investments accordingly.