Migrant Childhoods and Temporalities in India: A Reflective Engagement with Dominant Discourses
Abstract
Temporality is recognized as critical to the understanding of childhoods by contemporary scholars of childhood. This paper explores the varying temporalities through which marginal childhoods (and their educational inclusion), particularly those situated in contexts of temporary internal migration, are constructed in the Indian context. Drawing on ethnographic data from the city of Bangalore, this paper problematizes how dominant ideals around migration, childhood, and schooling frame migrant children’s lives through linear temporalities. Furthermore, the paper argues that policy interventions that ostensibly include migrant childhoods do not engage critically with the politics of linear temporality which, in turn, is central to the exclusionary dynamics of migrant children’s schooling.
Downloads
Metrics
References
Advani, S. (2009). Schooling the national imagination: Education, English, and the Indian modern. Oxford University Press.
Balagopalan, S. (2003). “Neither suited for the home nor for the fields”: Inclusion, formal schooling, and the Adivasi child. IDS Bulletin, 34(1), 43–54. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1759-5436.2003.tb00058.x
Balagopalan, S. (2014). Inhabiting “childhood”: Children, labour, and schooling in postcolonial India. Palgrave Macmillan.
Balagopalan, S., & Subrahmanian, R. (2003). Dalit and Adivasi children in schools: IDS Bulletin, 34(1), 43–54. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1759-5436.2003.tb00058.x
Batra, P. (2015). Quality of education and the poor: Constraints on learning. Working Paper No. 4, TRG Poverty & Education. Max Weber Stiftung Foundation.
Boyden, J. (2013). “We’re not going to suffer like this in the mud”: Educational aspirations, social mobility, and independent child migration among populations living in poverty. Compare: A Journal of Comparative and International Education, 43(5), 580–600. https://doi.org/10.1080/03057925.2013.821317
Christensen, P., & James, A. (2017). Research with children: Perspectives and practices. Routledge.
Dalal, J. (2015). The indelible class identity. Economic and Political Weekly, 50(8), 7–8.
de Haan, A. (1997). Unsettled settlers: Migrant workers and industrial capitalism in Calcutta. Modern Asian Studies, 31(4), 919–949. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0026749X00017200
Dhankar, R. (2017). Beyond the oxymoronic idea of no-detention policy. Economic and Political Weekly, 52(12), 36–42.
Drèze, J., & Sen, A. (2002). India: Development and participation. Oxford University Press.
Dyer, C. (2014). Livelihoods and learning: Education for All and the marginalisation of mobile pastoralists. Routledge.
Fetterman, D. M. (2009). Ethnography: Step-by-step. SAGE.
Ganguly, S. (2018). Social construction of a segregated urban space and its effects on education: A case study of the Balmikis of Delhi. Contemporary Education Dialogue, 15(1), 51–72. https://doi.org/10.1177/0973184917744972
Geertz, C. (1998, October 22). Deep hanging out. The New York Review of Books, 45(16). https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1998/10/22/deep-hanging-out/
Gidwani, V., & Sivaramakrishnan, K. (2003). Circular migration and the spaces of cultural assertion. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 93(1), 186–213. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8306.93112
Government of India. (2014). Census of India 2011 district census handbook: Bangalore. Directorate of Census Operations. http://censusindia.gov.in/2011census/dchb/2918_PART_A_DCHB_BANGALORE.pdf
Government of Karnataka. (2016). Economic survey of Karnataka 2015–16. Department of Planning, Programme Monitoring, & Statistics. https://des.kar.nic.in/docs/Economic%20Survey%202015-16_English%20Final.pdf
Gupta, A. (2002). Reliving childhood? The temporality of childhood and narratives of reincarnation. Ethnos, 67(1), 33–55. https://doi.org/10.1080/00141840220122959
Haas, H. D. (2007). International migration, remittances, and development: Myths and facts. Third World Quarterly, 26(8), 1269–1284. https://doi.org/10.1080/01436590500336757
Hanson, K. (2017). Embracing the past: “Been,” “being” and “becoming” children. Childhood, 24(3), 281–285. https://doi.org/10.1177/0907568217715347
Holloway, S. L., Holt, L., & Mills, S. (2019). Questions of agency: Capacity, subjectivity, spatiality, and temporality. Progress in Human Geography, 43(3), 458–477. https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132518757654
James, A., & Prout, A. (2015). Re-presenting childhood: Time and transition in the study of childhood. In A. James & A. Prout (Eds.), Constructing and reconstructing childhood (pp. 227–246). Routledge.
Jeffrey, C., Jeffery, R., & Jeffery, P. (2004). Degrees without freedom: The impact of formal education on Dalit young men in North India. Development and Change, 35(5), 963–986. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-7660.2004.00388.x
Kenny, M., & Danaher, P. A. (2009). Three dimensions of changing schools. In P. A. Danaher, M. Kenny, & J. R. Leder (Eds.), Traveller, nomadic and migrant education (pp. 1–12). Routledge.
Keshri, K., & Bhagat, R. B. (2012). Temporary and seasonal migration: Regional patterns, characteristics, and associated factors. Economic and Political Weekly, 47(4), 81–88.
Knight, H. (2019). Centering the problem child: Temporality, colonialism, and theories of the child. Global Studies of Childhood, 9(1), 72–83. https://doi.org/10.1177/2043610618825005
Kusenbach, M. (2003). Street phenomenology: The go-along as ethnographic research tool. Ethnography, 4(3), 455–485. https://doi.org/10.1177/146613810343007
Mishra, D. K. (2016). Introduction: Internal migration in contemporary India—An overview of issues and concerns. In D. K. Mishra (Ed.), Internal migration in contemporary India (pp. 1–15). SAGE.
Murchison, J. (2010). Ethnography essentials: Designing, conducting, and presenting your research. John Wiley & Sons.
Nandy, A. (1984). Reconstructing childhood: A critique of the ideology of adulthood. Alternatives, 10(3), 359–375. https://doi.org/10.1177/030437548401000303
Nielsen, H. (2015). The arrow of time in the space of the present: Temporality as methodological and theoretical dimension in child research. Children & Society, 30. https://doi.org/10.1111/chso.12116
Nuttall, J., & Thomas, L. (2015). Time and temporality in early childhood educators’ work. European Early Childhood Education Research Journal, 23(4), 512–523. https://doi.org/10.1080/1350293X.2014.970851
Parry, J. (2003). Nehru’s dream and the village “waiting room”: Long-distance labour migrants to a central Indian steel town. Contributions to Indian Sociology, 37(1–2), 217–249. https://doi.org/10.1177/006996670303700110
Pattenden, J. (2012). Migrating between rural Raichur and boomtown Bangalore: Class relations and the circulation of labour in South India. Global Labour Journal, 3(1), 163–190.
Pink, S. (2008). An urban tour: The sensory sociality of ethnographic place-making. Ethnography, 9(2), 175–196. https://doi.org/10.1177/1466138108089467
Premchander, S., Prameela, V., Banu, S., Meenaskshi, K. G., Manjunath, H., & Prema, T. (2014). The socio-economic status of migrant construction workers in Bangalore and intervention plan to improve their livelihoods. Urban India, 34(1), 112–133. https://www.shram.org/uploadFiles/20150417055241.pdf
PROBE Team. (1999). Public report on basic education in India. Oxford University Press.
Prout, A., & James, A. (2015). A new paradigm for the sociology of childhood?: Provenance, promise, and problems. In A. Prout & A. James (Eds.), Constructing and reconstructing childhood (pp. 7–32). https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315745008-2
Rajan, V. (2020). The ontological crisis of schooling: Situating migrant childhoods and educational exclusion. Contemporary Education Dialogue, 0973184920948364. https://doi.org/10.1177/0973184920948364
Rajan, V. (2021a). Migrant children and “free” education in India. Economic and Political Weekly, 56(48), 18–21.
Rajan, V. (2021b). Migrant childhoods and schooling in India: Contesting the inclusion-exclusion binary. Children’s Geographies. https://doi.org/10.1080/14733285.2021.2015288
Saul, R. (2020). Temporality and inequity: How dominant cultures of time promote injustices in schools. Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies, 42(1), 49–69. https://doi.org/10.1080/10714413.2020.1729078
Sharma, G. (2021). Schooling and aspirations in the urban margins: Ethnography of education in the Indian context. Routledge India.
Sridhar, K. S., Reddy, A. V., & Srinath, P. (2013). Is it push or pull? Recent evidence from migration into Bangalore, India. Journal of International Migration and Integration, 14(2), 287–306. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12134-012-0241-9
Sriprakash, A. (2016). Modernity and multiple childhoods: Interrogating the education of the rural poor in global India. In A. Sriprakash & L. Hopkins (Eds.), The “poor child”: The cultural politics of education, development, and childhood (pp. 151–167). Routledge.
Subrahmanian, R. (2003). Exploring processes of marginalisation and inclusion in education. IDS Bulletin, 34(1), 1–8. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1759-5436.2003.tb00053.x
Tesar, M. (2016). Timing childhoods: An alternative reading of children’s development through philosophy of time, temporality, place, and space. Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, 17(4), 399–408. https://doi.org/10.1177/1463949116677924
Tesar, M., Farquhar, S., Gibbons, A., Myers, C. Y., & Bloch, M. N. (2016). Childhoods and time: Rethinking notions of temporality in early childhood education. Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, 17(4), 359–366. https://doi.org/10.1177/1463949116677931
Uprichard, E. (2008). Children as “being and becomings”: Children, childhood, and temporality. Children & Society, 22(4), 303–313. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1099-0860.2007.00110.x
Velaskar, P. (2005). Educational stratification, dominant ideology, and the reproduction of disadvantage in India. In S. M. Dahiwale (Ed.), Understanding Indian society: The non-Brahmanic perspective (pp. 196–220). Rawat.
Copyright (c) 2023 Vijitha Rajan
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
Authors contributing to the Journal of Childhood Studies agree to release their articles under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 4.0 International license. This licence allows anyone to share their work (copy, distribute, transmit) and to adapt it for non-commercial purposes provided that appropriate attribution is given, and that in the event of reuse or distribution, the terms of this license are made clear.
Authors retain copyright of their work and grant the journal right of first publication.
Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
