The Political Future of Childhood Studies

The study of childhood in India has been generative intellectually and politically. Scholars working across disciplinary boundaries have insightfully traced the normative production of Indian childhoods to show how children’s lives are articulated, in a Hallsian sense, in projects of social domination (Hall 1980). We have seen, for example, a flourishing of historical and sociological scholarship over the last few decades, which has examined the governance of childhoods in India in relation to colonial and postcolonial social agendas (for example, Sen 2005; Balakrishnan 2011). The “development” of the child has been linked to the projects of national and indeed global “development,” and the gendered, racialised, caste-based, classed, urban-dominant and hetero-normative significations of childhood have been called into view. Put simply, through such scholarship, childhood is now more widely recognised as an arena of political struggle, rather than a neutral “stage of life” to be readily abstracted into social policy prescriptions.

Arena of Political Struggle