Abstract
Drawing data from an ethnographic study conducted in an early-years setting in Chennai, India, where everyday politics is couched in material and relational practices, the paper ruminates on the idea of ‘children as subjects’ in relation to politics and public life. By using the framework of ‘epistemologies of the south’, the analysis illustrates how a focus on ‘global cognitive justice’ might enable us to understand the politics of life in the global south differently from Western critical theory. The paper further deliberates on how such a ‘decolonial imagination’ would help us to reframe Eurocentric liberalist thinking and its conceptualisations of childhood and the political, practiced in a zone of messy social reality. In so doing, the paper tries to unpack ‘the political’ through paying particular attention to different ways of being, knowing, and doing children’s politics, and the subaltern practices of generational relations in subject making.
Highlights
The scholarship on children’s politics has received immense attention in recent years on different scales and dimensions
Many childhood scholars continue to be grappling with enquires such as ‘what qualifies something to be considered as political’, ‘why politics matters to children’, and ‘how children make a difference to the existing political landscape with their political acts’ (Bosco 2010; Hakli and Kallio 2014; Kallio and Hakli 2011, 2013; Kraftl 2013)
It is convincing to assume that everyday politics is as important as grand politics, because it is a major source for dissent and creativity (Nandy and Darby 2015) and, the everyday is always filled with ‘moments of translation and synthesis’ in which the macro and micro are ‘constantly entangled and co-productive’ in political ways (Neal and Murji 2015, p. 813)
Summary
The scholarship on children’s politics has received immense attention in recent years on different scales and dimensions (see the review of Skelton 2013, Millei and Kallio 2018; Nolas et al 2018b; Wyness et al 2004). There is widespread recognition that children are political actors in their own right and the politics that they interact with are diverse, complex, and unpredictable (Wyness 2014; Kallio and Hakli 2013; see Skelton 2013). Many childhood scholars continue to be grappling with enquires such as ‘what qualifies something to be considered as political’, ‘why politics matters to children’, and ‘how children make a difference to the existing political landscape with their political acts’ It is convincing to assume that everyday politics is as important as grand politics, because it is a major source for dissent and creativity (Nandy and Darby 2015) and, the everyday is always filled with ‘moments of translation and synthesis’ in which the macro and micro are ‘constantly entangled and co-productive’ in political ways (Neal and Murji 2015, p. 813)
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