Childhood, Youth, and Identity: A Roundtable Conversation from the Global South

Abstract

This roundtable session initially took place as part of the international conference “Childhood, Youth, and Identity in South Asia,” organized by the Department of History, Shiv Nadar University, Greater Noida, and the Centre for Publishing, Ambedkar University Delhi, India, on January 6–7, 2020.

Southern theories and decolonial childhood studies

“…This is a useful decolonizing strategy: it is by “speaking the language” that one can “speak back” to the knowledge framework one critiques and, ultimately, transforms it “from within”. This is also necessary as questions of “representation and the coloniality of knowledge production continue to shape how and where knowledge is produced, by whom, and how it circulates” (Kannan et al, 2022, 23). Furthermore, our strategy to ensure representation not only informed who published in the issue but also how we identified and invited reviewers.…”

“…The focus on southern theories is justified by the fact that the epistemic frames and ontological approaches considered central to the field’s inquiry indicate the dominance of euro-western and northern-centric worldviews. In an attempt to move beyond what Sarada Balagopalan (2019: 24) argues is the theoretical north - empirical south divide in childhood studies, which others have also taken up (Andal, 2021; de Castro, 2020a; Kannan et al, 2022); we envision an epistemic and theoretical pluralism in the “global” field of childhood studies. In so doing, we propose centering southern theories to rectify the onto-epistemological imbalances of our field and turn towards epistemic traditions and “scholars from other societies and traditions of inquiry” (Appadurai 1990, 237).…”

Decolonizing children’s agency: Perspectives of children in an Urdu-speaking Bihari camp in Bangladesh

“…In this line of thought, Sarada Balagopalan (2019: 24) also critiques the implicit divide between the theoretical north and empirical south and calls for a more critical exploration of the relational complexities of children’s everyday lives (see also Kannan et al, 2022).…”

Teaching ‘global childhoods’ in Childhood Studies

“…As many nations are turning towards a growing majoritarian and right-wing politics, the discourses on global childhoods need to move beyond questions of local-global alone (Dar in Kannan et al, 2022; Hanson et al, 2018), and turn to newer discourses, perhaps that of decolonizing, alongside an engagement with the politics of power and inequalities facing sub-altern children. One of my goals for such a course is to ensure that middle-class and savarna/caste-privileged students, at least to some extent, reflect on their privileges and do not get caught up in the syndrome of saving “other” childhoods by reproducing newer framings of “us” and “them” already existing within urban centers like Delhi, where we are located.…”