Over the past decade, the European Union and national policy-makers alike have paid more attention to childhood poverty and children's rights. Whether this has led to better policies, and whether these policies have in turn resulted in less childhood poverty and more human dignity, remains debatable. Children's rights may provide some common ground for the different perspectives on the causes of poverty. They also introduce specific process requirements, in particular the participation of the poor. At the same time, children's rights may gain from an encounter with child poverty studies, not least in grasping the complexity of child poverty and in making a realistic assessment of their own potential for addressing child poverty. This book introduces several approaches in the field of child poverty and children's rights studies, and identifies intersections between different theoretical approaches from both domains. It is a collaborative project of Centrum OASeS and the UNICEF Chair in Children's Rights, both located at the University of Antwerp. The Chair, established in 2007, acts as a knowledge broker of children's rights within the academic community and between the academic community and policy and practice, through teaching, research, and service to the community. The research topics of the Centrum OASeS include poverty and other forms of social exclusion, ethnic minorities, urban policy, social economy and supported employment, and social networks.

Since the beginning of the 1990s, the gradual widening of scientific and policy debates on poverty from a narrow focus on income poverty to a more inclusive concept of social exclusion, has made poverty research both more interesting and more complicated. This transition to a more multidimensional conceptualization of poverty forms the background and starting point of this book. Researchers studying the 'social' and 'spatial' dimensions of poverty have only started to challenge and explore the boundaries of each other's research perspectives and instruments. This book brings together these different bodies of literature on the intersection of spatial and social exclusion for the first time, by providing a state-of-the art review written by internationally-recognized experts who critically reflect on the theoretical status of their research on social exclusion, and on the implications this has for future research and policy-making agendas.

Since the beginning of the 1990s, the gradual widening of scientific and policy debates on poverty from a narrow focus on income poverty to a more inclusive concept of social exclusion, has made poverty research both more interesting and more complicated. This transition to a more multidimensional conceptualization of poverty forms the background and starting point of this book. Researchers studying the 'social' and 'spatial' dimensions of poverty have only started to challenge and explore the boundaries of each other's research perspectives and instruments. This book brings together these different bodies of literature on the intersection of spatial and social exclusion for the first time, by providing a state-of-the art review written by internationally-recognized experts who critically reflect on the theoretical status of their research on social exclusion, and on the implications this has for future research and policy-making agendas.