Through a rich ethnography of street and working children in Calcutta, India, this book offers the first sustained enquiry into postcolonial childhoods, arguing that the lingering effects of colonialism are central to comprehending why these children struggle to inhabit the transition from labour to schooling.

Drawing upon classroom ethnography and interviews with parents and pupils in urban central India, this book offers systematic sociological analyses of childhood, labour and schooling in postcolonial, post-liberalisation India. It combines insights from economic sociology, political economy and feminist critiques of capitalism, caste patriarchy and globalisation to theorise the relationship between educational experience and socioeconomic inequalities. It unpacks poverty as a structural condition shaped by class and caste relations, thus offering a vital intervention in dominant development discourses centring on the relationship between poverty and poor children’s schooling in the global South. Unravelling the interplay of poverty, caste patriarchy and shifts in the gendered division of reproductive labour, it challenges both the ‘girl effect’ narrative as well as the ‘school/labour’ binary. It offers insights into ‘labour class’ families’ experience of urban informal work, enabling a critical account of the gendered place of school in children’s lives and rendering visible poor parents’ and pupils’ efforts to ensure educational success. Thick descriptions of pedagogic and disciplinary processes and social relations in the classroom allow it to grapple with teachers’ ‘deficit view’ of the labour class as well as the impact of stratified schooling on teachers’ working conditions and teacher-pupil relations. The book presents a rare account of teenaged children’s gendered modes of negotiation of social relations at school and home, waged and unwaged work, economic and educational deprivation and pedagogic practices in the classroom. It will appeal to scholars interested in the sociology of education and childhood, gender and caste inequalities, international development, poverty and urban informal work.

This popular book provides a compelling introduction to thinking about childhood in rigorous and critical ways. Karen Wells offers a unique global perspective on children’s lives, showing how the notion of childhood varies widely and is continuously being radically re-shaped. Taking children seriously as active participants in society, the book explores key social issues such as how children are constituted as raced, classed and gendered subjects; how school and work operate as sites for the governing of childhood; and how children both shape and are shaped by politics, culture and the economy. Taking an engaging historical and comparative approach, the book discusses wide-ranging topics including children’s rights, the family, play, labour, migration and trafficking. In addition to updated literature throughout, this revised third edition includes extensive new material on children’s activism, politics and war, and a whole new chapter on juvenile justice. The book will continue to be of great value to students and scholars in the fields of sociology, geography, social policy and development studies. It will also be a valuable companion to practitioners whose work involves or impacts children, as well as to anyone interested in childhood in the contemporary world.

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Theories in Childhood Studies brings together an international group of childhood studies scholars who work with a range of critical theories. It speaks to both scholars and students by addressing questions such as how childhoods are diversely constructed and how children's experiences can be better understood. The volume draws together a diversity of theoretical perspectives from the social sciences and humanities such as critical race studies, disability studies, posthumanism, feminism, politics, decolonialism, queer theory and postcolonialism to generate a much-needed conversation about how to move childhood studies forward as a grounded field of research. The volume is subdivided into three sections - subjectivities, relationalities, and structures - each of which addresses different but interrelated approaches to childhood studies theorization. This handbook will be an essential text not just for childhood studies researchers, but for all those interested in theorizing what childhood is, what work it does and who children are.

This edited volume advances the conceptual framework of the 'everyday urban' to unpack the ways in which processes of modernity in India shape young subjects and, in so doing, centers the analytical categories of childhood and youth. In rejecting simplistic binaries of agency, and teleological logics of development and modernity, the authors focus on the complex pathways of negotiation and conflict that mark the lives of young people across various historical and contemporary contexts in urban India. Chapters are organized across two key themes: Shaping Modern Subjects and Being Modern Subjects, while spanning multiple disciplines including anthropology, history, sociology, disability studies, and psychology. Together, the contributions aim to advance the field of childhood and youth studies in South Asia and beyond.

This book highlights the significance of an interdisciplinary approach to understanding children and childhoods in the Indian context. While it is recognised that multiple kinds of childhoods exist in India, policy and practice approaches to working with children are still based on a singular model of the ideal child rooted in certain Western traditions. The book challenges readers to go beyond the acknowledgement of differences to evolving alternate models to this conception of children and childhoods. Bringing together well-known scholars from history, politics, sociology, child development, paediatrics and education, the volume represents four major themes: the history and politics of childhoods; deconstructing childhoods by analysing their representations in art, mythology and culture in India; selected facets of childhoods as constructed through education and schooling; and understanding issues related to law, policy and practice, as they pertain to children and childhoods. This important book will be useful to scholars and researchers of education, especially those working in the domains of child development, sociology of education, educational psychology, public policy and South Asian studies.

This book is an ethnographic exploration of slum children’s participation in NGO programs that centres children’s narratives as key to understanding the lived experience of development in India where 50% of the population is under the age of 25. Weaving theoretical and methodological interventions from anthropology, childhood studies and development studies with children’s own narratives and images, the author foregrounds children’s lifeworlds whilst documenting the extent to which these lifeworlds are shaped by the twin forces of marginalisation and aspiration. The book documents NGO campaigns targeting child marriage, sanitation and hygiene, gendered violence and bullying, and depicts and examines children’s sometimes enthusiastic, sometimes reluctant, and sometimes indifferent approach to narrating and performing development. It assesses the way in which children from four slum communities in New Delhi navigate the multiplicities and contradictions of development by analysing the stories, posters and performances children produce for NGOs. Moreover, the book argues that engagement with children’s narratives and performances provide valuable insights into how development attains meaning, garners consensus, fails, succeeds and circulates in a myriad of unexpected ways which consistently defy any assumptions about ‘underdeveloped’ subjectivities. The first book to interrogate the substance and subjectivities produced in the development of NGO organisations offering extra-curricular programs directed towards more intangible and experiential ends, it will be of interest to researchers working in anthropology, development studies, childhood studies and South Asian studies. The book also speaks to scholars working on issues of poverty, rural-urban migration, gender justice, slums and youth.