Street children and the politics of reform

On Tuesday June 9th at Birkbeck College (main building, room B20)from 6.30 – 9.00

Dr Sarada Balagopalan, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi, will be speaking on: Street children and the politics of reform.

Through mapping an international initiative to end child labour (IPEC) through its effects on a Kolkata-based NGO’s work with street children this paper discusses the tensions that mark both the staff and the children’s insertion in this programme. As the chief architects who crafted the everyday modalities of categorization, systemization and management of this population, it was the field staff that bore the anxieties of the success of implementation although the ‘how to’ was always more opaque than the ‘what’ to implement. Their success often hinged on their ability to fix and act upon the target population and in the case of street children this population was best secured through imagining these lives as lacking the ingredients of a normal childhood the most significant of which is the absence of family. However this imagination was also intimately tied to the production of identities amongst the field-level staff and this paper discusses the ways in which kinship-inflected idioms of parenting co-existed with the need to enumerate, classify and regulate the behavior of this population. The paper dwells on the ways in which particular tropes that underlie the discursive construction of ‘street children’ are constitutive of NGO efforts to reform this population, and exercise a dominant effect on the formation of subjectivities amongst both the children as well as the NGO staff.