Memories of Tomorrow: Children, Labor, and the Panacea of Formal Schooling

Balagopalan, Sarada

doi:10.1353/hcy.0.0005

Cited by 24 publications

(14 citation statements)

References 13 publications

(3 reference statements)

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“…Yet their negotiations of multiple expectations also indicate how a dominant discourse around educational success and work is culturally produced. A key effect of formal schooling on these young women's self-positioning is their conception of desirable work, and, conversely, their continued engagements with manual work (Balagopalan, 2008). As Meera pointed out, 'while you study you do less work', hence when school-girls become married women and are expected to contribute to hard labour they find it difficult, 'you are not used to it'.…”

Section: Youth's Gendered Negotiationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Subjects of Development: Teachers, Parents and Youth Negotiating Education in Rural North India

Morarji¹

2014

Eur J Dev Res

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This article examines negotiations of school education in a mountainous rural region of North India. I show how such negotiations are a part of broader cultural politics of development differentiated by class, generation and gender. In doing so, I address the utility and limitations of governmentality as a framework to understand how education and development shape young people's relationships to changing terms of social reproduction. My analysis draws on ethnographic studies of the micro-politics of development and education to highlight how they work through both disciplinary and governmental forms of power to re-entrench existing inequalities and boundaries, yet also involve negotiations and contradictory experiences by teachers, parents and youth. I argue that such experiences and articulations on the part of 'subjects' of development signal the limits of governmental power, and counter notions of inevitable outcomes and choices for the futures of rural youth and their communities.Cet article s'intéresse aux négociations relatives à l'enseignement scolaire dans une région rurale et montagneuse du nord de l'Inde. Je montre que ces négociations s'inscrivent dans une politique culturelle plus générale de développement variant en fonction de la catégorie sociale, de la génération et du sexe. Ce faisant, je traite de la question de l'utilité et des limites de la gouvernementalité en tant que cadre pour comprendre en quoi l'éducation et le développement influencent le rapport des jeunes aux changements dans la reproduction sociale. Mon analyse s'appuie sur des études ethnographiques sur la micro-politique du développement et de l'éducation pour montrer comment, à travers des formes de pouvoir à la fois disciplinaires et gouvernementales, ils renforcent les inégalités et les cloisonnements existants, mais mettent pourtant en jeu des négociations et des expériences contradictoires d'enseignants, de parents et de jeunes. Je soutiens que les expériences et voix des «sujets» du développement servent à signaler les limites du pouvoir gouvernemental et à contrecarrer l'idée d'issue inévitable et la notion de choix incontournables pour l'avenir de la jeunesse et des communautés rurales.

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Section: Youth's Gendered Negotiationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Subjects of Development: Teachers, Parents and Youth Negotiating Education in Rural North India

Morarji¹

2014

Eur J Dev Res

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“…In her published work, based on ethnographic studies on the intertwined issues of childhoods, labor, and schooling, Sarada Balagopalan (2002Balagopalan ( , 2008Balagopalan ( , 2014Balagopalan ( , 2019 has drawn attention to the deeply flawed nature of the attempts made by the state to end child labor through schooling. As she points out, the "drive to enrol all children in school has not significantly altered the imagination of the ways in which schooling needs to adapt itself to the needs of these new populations who inhabit its space" (2008, p. 278).…”

Section: Child Labor and Education: Critical Perspectivesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Child Labor and Education in South Asia

Pappu¹,

Vasanta²

2020

Handbook of Education Systems in South Asia

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This chapter provides an overview of the issues involved in ensuring education for working children in India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Nepal. The manner in which children's educational rights, as articulated in the UNCRC, are operationalized within specific policy frameworks in these countries is examined in the light of discussions on child rights and Southern childhoods. We point out that notwithstanding the introduction of many policies and measures at the national and international levels, the conception as well as the provision of education is yet to make meaningful connections with the lifeworlds and aspirations of working children. We argue that there is a need to re-vision the schooling system in order to evolve ways and means of offering education that is inclusive and relevant for working children in South Asia.

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“…In independent India this norm is deftly and variously rearticulated including in the work of dominant religious-cultural ideologies (Manjrekar, 2011, this issue) as well as more pedantically through the state's continual pedagogic efforts to develop ideal citizen-subjects. More recently the latter, because of the increased role played by civil society institutions global charity and international funding regimes, has included image-driven representations around children's exploitation and the need for their 'saving' (Balagopalan 2008;Sircar and Dutta, 2011, this issue).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Introduction: Children’s lives and the Indian context

Balagopalan

2011

Childhood

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Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS), IndiaIt would be safe by now to assume that the idea of 'multiple childhoods' is not something that researchers within the field of childhood studies require to be convinced about. Multiple childhoods was an exciting epistemic shift precisely because its social constructionist lens released the concept of 'childhood' from its normative moorings, thereby making it available as an object of historical, sociological and ethnographic study. This has helped produce substantial research that has denaturalized the assumed universality of concepts like biological age, adult-child differentiation, notions of child-care, children's work as well as the affective investment that adults make in children. More than 20 years on, I seek to define a broad outline for 'childhood studies' in the Indian context. The contours of this definition engage with the tension that continues to haunt the discipline of 'childhood studies': namely that between an emphasis on a singular 'ideal' child as a normative index or what has been variously referred to as childhood 'essentialism' (Nieuwenhuys, 2010) or its 'enduring structural form' (Qvortrup, 2009), on the one hand, and on the other the apparent expansiveness of the concept 'multiple childhoods'. This tension assumes greater moral resonance when its material form is that of the poor non-Western child. Theorists on Indian modernity have been engaged in debating for more than several decades now the broader issues that this tension raises. While the figure of the child has not necessarily been part of their debates, existing writing on Indian modernity can inform a creative re-articulation of this tension, thereby expanding our theoretical lens in understanding non-Western childhoods.The landscape of 'childhood studies' contends with this tension primarily because its rise as a discipline parallels the growing hegemony of the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) within international policy discourse (Burman and Stacey, 2010), producing a complex inter-relationship between the open-endedness of academic interrogation and determinate policy concerns. The CRC phenomenally expanded the global focus on children and set in place a new vocabulary with which to represent these lives. Located within this emergent framework, childhood studies has produced research that situates itself within this new discourse of rights, while simultaneously generating some of the most trenchant and insightful critiques of the bourgeois hegemony that underlies the

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Memories of Tomorrow: Children, Labor, and the Panacea of Formal Schooling

Cited by 24 publications

References 13 publications

Subjects of Development: Teachers, Parents and Youth Negotiating Education in Rural North India

Subjects of Development: Teachers, Parents and Youth Negotiating Education in Rural North India

Child Labor and Education in South Asia

Introduction: Children’s lives and the Indian context

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