Inhabiting 'childhood' : children, labour and schooling in postcolonial India / Sarada Balagopalan.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Balagopalan, Sarada, 1966- author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Street children--India--Social conditions.

Street children.

Child labor--India.

Child labor.

Social conditions.

India.

Education--India.

Education.

Child welfare--India.

Child welfare.

Physical Description:

xi, 237 pages ; 23 cm

Place of Publication:

Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire ; New York, NY : Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.

Summary:

"Although 'multiple childhoods' recognizes children's lives as heterogeneous and culturally inscribed, the figure of the 'victimized' child continues to test the limits of this framework. Inhabiting 'Childhood' ambitiously redresses these limits by drawing on the everyday experiences of street children and child labourers in Calcutta to introduce the postcolony as a critical, and thus far absent, lens in theorizing the 'child'. Through capturing a moment in which global, national and local efforts combined to improve and transform these children's lives through school enrolment and new discourses of 'children's rights', this ethnography makes a vital point about the complexity and contemporaneity of their extensive practices of dwelling generated by the exigencies of survival within postcolonial 'development'. These modes of living labour are central to comprehending why these children though desirous of the transition from labour to school, find this difficult to inhabit. This book argues that this difficulty, which can be neither dissolved through a 'cultural' understanding of these lives nor resolved within a more technocratic policy norm, is in fact a very productive opening to re-thinking 'childhood'"-- Provided by publisher.

Contents:

Introduction

Re-forming lives: the child on the street and the 'street child'

Sedimenting labour through schooling: colonial state, native elite and working children in early twentieth-century India

Memories of tomorrow: on children, labour and postcolonial 'development'

The politics of failure: children's rights and the 'call of the other'

'A magic wand': reading the promise of the 'right to education' against the lives of working children

Conclusion: growing up, moving on...

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 212-227) and index.

ISBN:

9780230296428

0230296424

OCLC:

865063339

Online:

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