Abstract
This article explores the intersections between discourses on children from the North and South (India as a case in point). Some similarities can be seen between Western and Indian conceptualizations with the child occupying subaltern spaces. Both in the North and South children are marginalized in sociological discourses; there is a perceived emergent decrease in patriarchal control of children by adults, with adult-child relations becoming more democratic and participatory, manifested in greater negotiation of control by children. The New Sociology of Childhood that evolved in the “Century of the Child” notable as childhood has brought children into the arena of International politics and academic debates in both the North and the South.
Highlights
Both in the West and in India plurality of childhoods are being acknowledged in discourses on childhood
Childhood in India is located in various domains, identity per se is perceived as a more stable and unified construct, and not yet been deconstructed as provisional or contingent as found in the postmodern discourses located in the West, where the essentialism found in the modernist understanding of the child, and the Universalist construction of ‘childhood’ has recently been deconstructed by social constructionists
Even while childhoods vary in the West and the East, North and the South, there can be found intersections between Western and Indian childhoods which I explore and construct under the following subheadings: 1) Childhood - a social construction; 2) Convergence and divergence between Western and Indian childhoods; 3) Conceptualizations of childhood; 4) Marginalization of children; 5) The blurring of boundaries between adults and children; 6) Childrens agency; 7) The changing notions of childhood; and 8) The New Sociology of Childhood
Summary
Both in the West and in India plurality of childhoods are being acknowledged in discourses on childhood. Childhood in India is located in various domains, identity per se is perceived as a more stable and unified construct, and not yet been deconstructed as provisional or contingent as found in the postmodern discourses located in the West, where the essentialism found in the modernist understanding of the child, and the Universalist construction of ‘childhood’ has recently been deconstructed by social constructionists. Even while childhoods vary in the West and the East, North and the South, there can be found intersections between Western and Indian childhoods which I explore and construct under the following subheadings: 1) Childhood - a social construction; 2) Convergence and divergence between Western and Indian childhoods; 3) Conceptualizations of childhood; 4) Marginalization of children; 5) The blurring of boundaries between adults and children; 6) Childrens agency; 7) The changing notions of childhood; and 8) The New Sociology of Childhood
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