Schooling and/as the work of normalizing protected childhoods and unregulated futures

• In Event: Dissertation Workshops 11-12 and Publication Workshop 6
  In Special Session: Publication Workshop: Inclusive Education [by invitation only]

Abstract

Framed as a conversation between Anthropology of Policy (Shore & Wright 1997) and the emerging Anthropology of Childhoods field (Bluebond-Langner & Korbin 2007) this paper unpacks the schooling of ‘childhood’ as a political technology for the ordering of contemporary life. As ‘childhood’ is increasingly a site of as well as a justification for policy intervention, children’s daily lives are increasingly and intimately caught up in particular global and globalizing political-economic and cultural projects – projects that, as Stephens (1995) first noted, cannot be extricated from global processes of production and exchange. Drawing on over twenty months of ethnographic data from a “strategic situated single site” (Marcus 1998), this paper explicates how the rights-based policy regime – in particular, the transnational project of ‘global childhood’ with its privileging of schooling-spaces (Wells 2009) – articulates with neoliberal economic development and, by rendering the neoliberal project unremarkable and mundane, extends it.

Since the turn of the century, the hand-looms of Kanchipuram, in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu and renowned the world over for its unique and eponymous kanjeevaram silk-sari, have been targeted by transnational efforts to protect children by “rescuing” them from work and “rehabilitating” them in state-run classrooms, as a means of “giving them back their childhood.”However, even as Kanchipuram’s looms were being transformed into a “child labor-free zone,” other zoning policies were also in effect – the state-subsidized Special Economic Zones (SEZs) in particular that, with their foreign investment-friendly, deliberately deregulated labor policies, embodied the neoliberal turn of Indian economic policy. Consequently, in their policy-mandated protective move from loom to classroom, children were also dislocated onto the multinational assembly-line spaces of the SEZs, often describing a trajectory from the loom to school to SEZ – itself, a neat assembly-line, as an approving, if uncritical, teacher put it. The Kanchipuram paradox then, of child rights, freedoms and protections afforded in schooling-spaces by bringing children into particular relations with the state, alongside the deliberately deregulated free-market spaces of the SEZs that strip them of protections, freedoms and rights by bringing them into other relations with the state and multinational capital.

This paper demonstrates how, in fact, it was the simultaneous outworking of both policy regimes – rights-based compulsory schooling efforts and SEZ promotional policies – that made either one work; Kanchipuram as a ‘child labor-free zone’ was possibilized and made sensible to parents, teachers and children insofar as they perceived schooling-spaces and SEZ-spaces to be contiguous. I describe, in fine-grained, ethnographic detail, how schooling policies and practices, while invoking children’s right to protection, also reordered relational modalities in and through classroom routines and disciplines, to re-present the precarious futures on SEZ assembly lines as normal and unexceptional.

Whether the all-important school certificate that, by constituting the age and identity “proofs” required by contract labor suppliers, coupled schooling and SEZ spaces together; or the twice-yearly school breaks that rendered acceptable the “breaks in service” used cynically by SEZ companies to terminate labor contracts with repercussions; or the school-based relations with peers and teachers that replaced the familial and familiar intergenerational relations on the loom but closely mimicked labor relations on assembly-lines, with fellow-workers and supervisors; or children’s significant experiences in classrooms of being “jolly” with their peers, sharing Polo and Five-star chocolates or smuggling cell-phones into class to play ‘games’, that paralleled SEZ-work, described primarily as “jolly”-times gossiping in the company-cafeteria or smuggling cell-phones onto the factory-floor; or indeed, the daily work of classrooms – the “learning to sit still with a book in hand” that teachers singled out as they key factor in the loom-to-school; they all initiated children into dispositions and modes of regulations particularly attuned to SEZ needs. Perhaps most significant of all, it was in the practices of managing expectations that schooling and SEZ spaces resonated with each other the most – if little academic learning occurred in classrooms despite day after day of “copying” answers out into notebooks, but where students were nevertheless promoted to the next higher class, then so too with SEZ contracts where daily attendance was incentivized but allowed for no future promotion prospects beyond moving to the newest SEZ company on yet another short-term labor contract. Classrooms, then, were practice grounds for the affective labor of making “jolly” with peers to make palatable their passive participation in classrooms and in SEZs. Schooling, if you will, as the work of inculcating an SEZ habitus.

[Ph.D. candidate, writing up the dissertation]

Author

• Miriam Thangaraj, University of Wisconsin-Madison