Children and the Politics of Culture

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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Children and the Politics of Culture

Cited by 11 publications

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