Posted on by Nina Ginsberg

Global Childhood Juxtapositions: World Children’s Day 2019

Global Childhood Juxtapositions: World Children’s Day 2019. Bicycles Create Change.com 22nd Nov 2019.
Rohingya refugee childrens waiting for food at Hakimpara refugee camp in Cox’s Bazar. With children making up around 60 percent of the Rohingya that have fled into Bangladesh, many below 18 years old arrived into the makeshift tents highly traumatized after seeing family members killed and homes set on fire. Image: @ugurgallen. Photo: K.M. Asad @kmasad

Regular readers of this blog know that my PhD research explores how bicycles feature in rural African girls’ access to education. This means mobility, education, in/equity, gender justice and children’s rights are central to much of the work I do. They are also reoccurring themes for this blog. I regularly post articles that showcase how bicycles create more positive social, environmental and educational change for all – and in many cases for children specifically.

A few previous BCC posts that feature bikes and kids are:

November 20th is the World Children’s Day.

This year, I wanted to acknowledge this date in a different way.

Instead of sharing a project where children benefit from bikes, I wanted to highlight the juxtapositions of cultural experiences of children around the world.

Global Childhood Juxtapositions: World Children’s Day 2019. Bicycles Create Change.com 22nd Nov 2019.
In this photograph taken on April 28, 2018, Afghan children work at a coal yard on the outskirts of Jalalabad. Image: @ugurgallen. Photo: @noorulah_shirzada

Expand your cultural competency

This week in my Griffith Uni 1205MED Health Challenges for the 21st Century class, we discussed cultural competency and cultural safety. I challenged my students to set themselves a cultural competency experiment/activity for homework – something that they needed to do that would push them outside their own cultural box.

It is too easy for us to think that our experience of life is how it is everywhere.

In Western countries, we are very privileged and sheltered. The experiences of being a child in Australia, the US, Europe, Scandinavia or the UK is vastly different than those in less advantaged countries.

To more broadly consider how culture and environment impact children’s lives differently, look no further than artist Uğur Gallenkuş (@ugrgallen) – his work does this uncompromisingly.

Global Childhood Juxtapositions: World Children’s Day 2019. Bicycles Create Change.com 22nd Nov 2019.
In October 2018, the United Nations warned that 13 million people face starvation in what could be “the worst famine in the world in 100 years. In November 2018, according to the New York Times report, 1.8 million children in Yemen are extremely subject to malnutrition. Image: @ugurgallen.

Global Childhood Juxtapositions: The work of Uğur Gallenkuş.

To honour 2019 World Children’s Day, I’m sharing some of Turkish artist Uğur Gallenkuş work. Uğur is a digital artist who collages images to highlight binaries, juxtapositions and contrasts in human experience. His work comments on conflicts, political issues and social disparities. Some pieces can be quite confronting, others heartfelt, but all have a clear message and are thought-providing.

Uğur’s work forces us to rethink our privilege and remind us that we need to think, feel and act beyond our own immediate cultural experience.

And that many children worldwide need a voice, recognition and help.

Global Childhood Juxtapositions: World Children’s Day 2019. Bicycles Create Change.com 22nd Nov 2019.
A man holds a wounded Syrian baby at a makeshift clinic in the rebel-held town of Douma, on the eastern outskirts of Damascus, on September 26, 2017 following reported air strikes by Syrian government forces. Air strikes killed at least four civilians in a truce zone outside the Syrian capital, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitor said. Image: @ugurgallen. Photo: Abdullah Hammam @abdullah_hm88 @afpphoto
Global Childhood Juxtapositions: World Children’s Day 2019. Bicycles Create Change.com 22nd Nov 2019.
Nine year old Alladin collects used ammunition to sell as metal in Aleppo, Syria. Image: @ugurgallen. Photo: @niclashammarstrom
Volunteers help a refugee man and baby as refugees hoping to cross into Europe, arrive on the shore of Greece‘s Lesbos Island after crossing the Aegean sea from Turkey on November, 2015. Image: @ugurgallen. Photo: Özge Elif Kızıl @oekizil @anadoluajansi
Global Childhood Juxtapositions: World Children’s Day 2019. Bicycles Create Change.com 22nd Nov 2019.
Yemeni children attend class on the first day of the new academic year in the country’s third-city of Taez on September 3, 2019, at a school that was damaged last year in an air strike during fighting between the Saudi-backed government forces and the Huthi rebels. Image: @ugurgallen. Photo: Ahmad Al-Basha @afpphoto
Global Childhood Juxtapositions: World Children’s Day 2019. Bicycles Create Change.com 22nd Nov 2019.
A child fighter with poses with a gun at a military training facility during the Liberian Civil War. Image: @ugurgallen. Photo: Patrick Robert @gettyimages
Global Childhood Juxtapositions: World Children’s Day 2019. Bicycles Create Change.com 22nd Nov 2019.
Children of displaced Syrian refugee family use paving stones as pillows at Erbil, Iraq in 2013. Image: @ugurgallen. Photo: Emrah Yorulmaz @emrahyorulmaz04 @anadoluajansi
Global Childhood Juxtapositions: World Children’s Day 2019. Bicycles Create Change.com 22nd Nov 2019.
Yelena Shevel, 10, who dreams of becoming a vet, learns to put on a gas mask during training at LIDER, a summer camp in the outskirts of Kiev, Ukraine. She believes that “it is important to defend our homeland because if we don’t do it, then Russia will capture Ukraine and we will become Russia,”. Hundreds of children play war games while they are getting trained in military disciplines and in firing tactics. The armed conflict between Ukraine and Russian-backed separatists is entering its fifth year; the conflict is still festering. Time for playing with toys is gone. Education, living in dreams. Schools are destroyed by indiscriminate shelling or deliberately turned into military posts. Children and teachers stay at home, afraid to step on a landmine or be caught in the crossfire of warring parties. The house of learning, envisioned as a safe haven, becomes a target. Image: @ugurgallen. Photo: Diego Ibarra Sanchez @diego.ibarra.sanchez @natgeo

See more of Uğur’s work on Instagram -it is well worth checking out.

All images are created by Uğur Gallenkuş.

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