McCarthy, Annie
Description
Stories of and by marginalised children in development programs
circulate widely in contemporary mediascapes. Beyond these
stories and images, which typically depict narratives of
victimisation, or of agency against the odds, very little can be
gleaned of these children’s lives or their relationship to the
development programs they attend. This thesis, based on fieldwork
among children who live in four slums in Delhi, India, explores
the way children engaged...[Show more] with the programs of a media NGO
(non-government organisation). The main focus of this
organisation was the training of children in the production of
certain kinds of developmental messages and methods of
self-expression, and it is this focus that I examine in this
thesis.
Alongside my ethnographic observations of children’s
participation in these NGO classes and campaigns, the ethnography
is enriched with a careful reading of children’s performances,
stories and drawings produced in the course of these classes.
Rather than view such activities as instrumental or demonstrative
of children’s participation in NGO schemes, I argue that our
understanding of children’s lived experience of development can
be ‘thickened’ through a reading of texts and performances
that these children produce in NGO spaces. Such considerations
allow for a much richer appreciation of the development discourse
and the way it is deployed in the NGO space, by children and NGO
workers.
The children I worked with entered the NGO spaces already tagged
as ‘underdeveloped’ slum children. It was expected that in
the space of these NGO’s and ‘under’ the principles and
theories of development, the children could improve their futures
and those of their communities. While frequently performing or
enacting this category of the 'underdeveloped child', the
children also displayed a keen sense of the development
discourse. As such, they were able to skilfully and
instrumentally employ a range of positions, from innocent victims
to conscious agents, to subvert, disrupt or co-opt the development
categories that framed their lives. The kinds of performances and
narratives children produced in NGO spaces that I discuss in this
thesis cover a range of key issues such as hygiene, marriage and
gender violence. They all point to a pragmatic, playful,
opportunistic and ultimately personal approach to development. I
have tried to represent this in this thesis both textually and
visually, using images and photoessays to compliment my written
material.
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