‘Adverts Make Me Want to Break the Television’: Indian Children and their Audiovisual Media Environment in Three Contrasting Locations

Behind the high-tech fetish: Children, work and media use across classes in India

“…I have used aspects of these conversations to contextualise what children told us, but never to privilege adult perspectives. Some of the data has appeared in previous studies (notably, Banaji, 2010Banaji, , 2012Banaji, , 2013.…”

“…Approached phenomenologically, children's accounts elucidate their participation in all kinds of social goods (enabling parents to work, tenderness to grandparents, friends, siblings) and social injustice (caste and gender discrimination, sexual violence, religious violence). Both structural and phenomenological approaches also point to children's solidarity and resilient participation in multiple overlapping social contexts (Banaji, 2010;Bernats-Kovat, 2006) as well as the potential manipulation and perversion of their economic and political agency by religious and political propagandists, neoliberal corporations or nongovernment organisations and unethical adults. In my study, beginning with worries about being beaten or going hungry and losing their employment, issues causing anxiety to the children ranged from recognisable complaints about bullying, homework and parental surveillance, to false accusations of theft, being caught touching upper-class or upper-caste items and humiliated, beaten or bringing ruin on families, sexual harassment and molestation, parental ill-health and job loss, chemical burns, and wage loss due to forced school enrolment.…”