ABSTRACT

Modern schooling systems operate through normative and sedentary framings of childhood, within which migrant childhoods get constructed as outliers. This paper problematizes the discriminatory ways in which such a system operates. The inclusionary mechanisms adopted to ‘mainstream’ ‘hard to reach’ migrant children into formal schools do not address the fundamental spatio-temporal modalities of modern schooling. This complicates the relationship between migrant childhoods and presumed policy dichotomies such as inclusion and exclusion. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in the southern Indian city of Bangalore, this paper foregrounds how migrant children’s lives, are spatio-temporally liminal and precarious in the city. It further explores how these modalities of migrant children’s lives are in discordance with the spatio-temporal framing of modern childhood and schooling. Moreover, migrant children’s own experiences of schooling and socio-spatial marginalization in the city bring out the contradictions of modern schooling.

摘要

现代学校教育系统通过规范和久坐不动的童年框架运作，在这些框架内，流动人口的童年被构建为异常值。本文对此类系统运行的歧视性方式提出了问题。为将“难以接触到”的流动儿童“主流化”到正规学校而采用的包容性机制并没有解决现代学校教育的基本时空模式。这使流动人口童年与假定的政策二分法（如包容和排斥）之间的关系复杂化。本文借鉴印度南部城市班加罗尔的民族志田野调查，突出了流动儿童的生活在城市中如何在时空上处于阈限和不稳定状态。它进一步探讨了流动儿童的这些生活方式如何与现代童年和学校教育的时空框架不一致。此外，流动儿童自身在城市就学和社会空间边缘化的经历也凸显了现代学校教育的矛盾。