"Neoliberal Childhoods"? Working Children in Kanchipuram, India, and the Outworkings of the "Combating Child Labor With Education" Policy Regime

• In Event: 63.018 - Promising Scholarship in Education: Dissertation Fellows and Their Research

Abstract

Stephens (1995) was one of the first to point out that the global ‘export’ of particular notions of childhood – such as those embedded in rights-based educational policies and protections – was inextricably linked to global processes of production and exchange. If in the last three decades, neoliberal economic agenda became increasingly entrenched across borders as the policy orthodoxy, then right-based imperatives have also grown in stridency over this period, to become the global commonsense, in particular, in responding to children everywhere. Kanchipuram, in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu, offers a ‘strategic’ site for studying the articulation of rights-based educational policies and neoliberal economic development regimes, to explicate how these two sets of policies which, on the face it, appear antithetical, have nevertheless advanced in tandem. To do so, I start with the often overlooked vantage point of children’s daily lives, drawing on insights from the emerging fields of Childhood Studies and Anthropology of Policy, to describe the new (and neoliberal) ways that policy regimes construct for people – for children – to be and become.
The weaving communities of Kanchipuram, custodians of the longstanding and unique weave that has made the eponymous kanjeevaram sari renowned world over, have been targeted by transnational efforts to “rescue” children from the hand-looms and “rehabilitate” them in state-run classrooms. Over the last fifteen years, if the looms were being transformed into a “child labor-free zone” under the aegis of the International Labor Organization’s International Programme for the Elimination of Child Labor (IPEC) – the largest global programmatic effort against child labor – then other transnationally-promoted zoning policies were also being simultaneously effected in Kanchipuram. The state-subsidized Special Economic Zones (SEZs) in particular that, with their foreign investment-friendly, deliberately deregulated labor policies, perhaps best embodied the neoliberal turn in India post the World Bank and IMF (International Monetary Fund)-led structural adjustment program of the 1990s. My research considers the situated effects of the two policy regimes – right-based schooling and neoliberal economic development – as they converged in the daily lives of child workers in Kanchipuram, to describe how the seemingly paradoxical inclinations of these two sets of policies – of policy-mandated right(s)-ful childhood spaces free from work, and legally-justified adult spaces free from work-based rights and protections – are productive of new forms of what I tentatively call ‘neoliberal childhoods.’

Author

• Miriam Thangaraj, University of Wisconsin - Madison