[Reader-list] SociologySeminar at SAU: Sarada Balagopalan

[Diya Mehra]

The Department of Sociology, South Asian University cordially invites
you to a seminar:



Inhabiting ‘Childhood’ in Postcolonial India

 

By Sarada Balagopalan, Associate Professor, Centre for
the Study of Developing Societies, New Delhi

 

Wednesday, 29 January 2014, 2.30
pm, FSI Hall, Ground Floor, South Asian University, Akbar Bhavan, Chanakyapuri, New Delhi

 

This paper discusses street children’s lives in
relation to the local materialization of a global politics of ‘childhood’. The
street child --at once ‘victim’ and yet highly ‘agential’-- signals a certain
messiness around assumed vectors of age, care, ability and innocence that this
normative ‘childhood’ register works with. Through capturing a moment in which
global, national and local efforts combined to improve and transform these
children’s lives through school enrollment and new discourses of ‘children's
rights’, this paper focuses on the complexity and contemporaneity of their
extensive practices of dwelling generated by the exigencies of survival within
postcolonial ‘development’. It considers whether these practices of dwelling -
which can neither be dissolved through a ‘cultural’ reading of these children’s
lives nor resolved within a more technocratic policy norm – might be a
productive opening to re-thinking ‘childhood’ more generally.