Anandini Dar

The trumpet and the drum: music and reclaiming the delinquent child

Childhoods and Youth in India: Engagements with Modernity, 2023

Projects to reclaim the delinquent child were symbolically important to late colonial modernity. ... more Projects to reclaim the delinquent child were symbolically important to late colonial modernity. Controlling the bodies and reforming the minds of a small number of children became a way for politicians and administrators to prove their own scientific modernity and offered a symbolic space in which supposedly wayward children could be educated into new relationships with the state. This chapter focuses on the role of music and participation in brass bands as a means of disciplining children into particular forms of modern citizenship through looking at the records of the Reformatories and Certified Schools in the Madras Presidency. It then draws parallels with the ways in which Salvation Army missionaries in South India used musical training as part of their project to reform children from the Criminal Tribes settlements into respectable and morally upright future citizens, their participation in uniformed musical performances both contesting and reinforcing the rigidity of late colonial racialised hierarchies and the perception that Indian children were irredeemably flawed. Through a close reading of the administrative records, the memoirs and photographs of missionaries and the silent moving images captured in the British Film archive which show the bands marching and performing, the chapter considers the ways in which musically gifted children separated from familial support networks were regulated into modern patterns of daily behaviour and modern understandings of the self as individualised rights-bearing subjects. It considers the details of the children’s lives and daily routines, musical training and career trajectories to glean fleeting hints of their daily lives and capacity to make choices, using adult-authored sources to give some insight into the opportunities offered to musically gifted children, and also querying the limitations of this source material. By focusing on a group of exceptional children, chosen because of perceived natural ability, the chapter unpicks how the colonial juvenile justice system was used to inculcate new forms of loyalty and to discipline future children into the moral and social hierarchies of late colonial modernity.

De-Colonizing Children’s Suffrage: Engagements with Dr B R Ambedkar’s Ideas on Democracy

Springer eBooks, 2022

Decolonizing Children's Suffrage: Engagements with Dr. B. R. Ambedkar's Ideas on Democracy

Exploring Children's Suffrage, 2023

In this chapter, I draw on Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar’s arguments for universal suffrage, democracy, ... more In this chapter, I draw on Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar’s arguments for universal suffrage, democracy, representation, and minority rights to theorize children’s inclusion in a democracy. I demonstrate that Ambedkar’s location as a Dalit activist, political thinker, scholar, and Chairperson of the Drafting Committee of the Constitution of India situates him as a consequential southern theorist whose ideas offer a possibility to theorize and de-colonize children’s suffrage rights. Ambedkar’s arguments can be drawn upon for the case of children’s suffrage rights today as modern childhoods are rife with economic, social, and political discrimination. I demonstrate how the enfranchisement of children is not a “monstrous” or an “impractical endeavour,” as suggested when other minorities were being excluded from suffrage rights in India’s emergence as a democracy. Instead, Ambedkar’s ideas on democracy are valuable to childhood studies and to larger debates on universal suffrage as they offer a de-colonial theory for children’s suffrage rights. These discussions in this chapter provide both a conceptual framework to understand children’s franchise as well as directions for the eventual working out of it in practice.

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Southern theories and decolonial childhood studies

Childhood

This special issue contributes insights into ongoing debates on the politics and ethics of knowle... more This special issue contributes insights into ongoing debates on the politics and ethics of knowledge production in “global” childhood studies by decentering dominant, northern-centric models of childhood and using southern epistemologies. We contest the ways in which most of the world’s children have their experiences and contexts interpreted through the theoretical canons, vernaculars and institutions of northern academia. Drawing on studies that deploy indigenous, decolonial and postcolonial perspectives on the study of childhood and children in different temporal moments and spatial contexts of Africa, Latin America and South Asia, authors of papers aim to push the boundaries for ways of knowing children and doing childhood studies through cross-disciplinary, generative south-north and south-south encounters. The special issue critically engages with questions of epistemic plurality and bottom-up theorization of research with globally southern children, to both rectify the onto-e...

Co-Designing Urban Play Spaces to Improve Migrant Children’s Wellbeing

Institute of Development Studies, 2022

Between 2001 and 2011, India’s urban population increased from almost 28 per cent to just over 31... more Between 2001 and 2011, India’s urban population increased from almost 28 per cent to just over 31 per cent. Almost 139 million people migrated to cities (mainly Delhi and Mumbai), often bringing their children with them. Most live in poverty in informal settlements that lack basic infrastructure and services. Their children are often out of school and have no safe spaces to play. The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC), ratified by India in 1989, recognises children’s right to play as fundamental to their social, emotional, and physical wellbeing. Urban planners need to involve children in co-designing better neighbourhoods that accommodate children’s right to play.

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Childhood, Youth, and Identity: A Roundtable Conversation from the Global South

Journal of Childhood Studies

This roundtable session initially took place as part of the international conference “Childhood, ... more This roundtable session initially took place as part of the international conference “Childhood, Youth, and Identity in South Asia,” organized by the Department of History, Shiv Nadar University, Greater Noida, and the Centre for Publishing, Ambedkar University Delhi, India, on January 6–7, 2020.

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Political Geographies of Youth

Political geographies of youth can be defined as the politics of young people across differing ge... more Political geographies of youth can be defined as the politics of young people across differing geographical and environmental landscapes, geo-economic contexts, and spatial domains. It is also understood as a new subfield of research within childhood studies and the related subfield of children’s geographies. This entry provides an overview of the differing kinds of research inquiries that constitute this field and shape the meaning of political geographies of youth. This entry also highlights the challenges within contemporary research on the politics of youth geographies and suggestions for future directions of research.

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Performative politics: South Asian children’s identities and political agency

Childhood, 2018

This article explores the cultural, youthful, and embodied acts of subject-making of South Asian ... more This article explores the cultural, youthful, and embodied acts of subject-making of South Asian immigrant teens growing up in a post 9/11 New York City, wherein they experience Islamophobia in their neighborhoods and schools. I argue that these acts of subject-making, situated in particular sociopolitical contexts, and made evident in multiple in-between sites of an after-school center, street corners, and online forums, can be read as performative politics of youth, and offer insights into the political agency of young people.

format_quoteJudith Butler's theory of performativity frames identity as enacted through repeated actions, which informs the subject formation of desi youth.format_quote

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Children's Political Representation: The Right to Make a Difference

The International Journal of Children's Rights, 2011

While children's rights have made significant gains in recent decades, children and youth con... more While children's rights have made significant gains in recent decades, children and youth continue to wield relatively little power in determining the nature of their societies' rights as such. This article sets out to explore what it might mean for children to enjoy genuine political representation. While it is often acknowledged that children should possess political rights to participation, voice, and citizenship, we argue that there is a need also for their more specific right to representation in democratic government. Furthermore, this right can be realized only if the very notion of representation is rethought along post-modern lines in light of children's particular experiences: as a right not so much to exercise autonomy as to make a political difference. The article examines recent movements toward children's involvement in policy-making, children's parliaments, and children's voting, and then makes practical proposals for enabling children's fu...

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Displacement and Placemaking in Design Studios

by Divya Chopra, Anandini Dar, and Morgan Ip

Architecture_MPS. Vol. 21(1), 2022

This article explores how placemaking took place in architectural and design studios working with... more This article explores how placemaking took place in architectural and design studios working with migrant and displaced communities at universities in three countries. Placemaking is a dimension of architectural and urban design practice that is emulated in architectural design studios – and often takes the form of a top-down and expert-driven exercise. In contrast, bottom-up placemaking is constituted through spontaneous and everyday practices in a given locality. The studios engaged with social scientists with a particular focus on displaced and immigrant communities. In Delhi, a multi-disciplinary social design studio at Ambedkar University applied community engagement and a service design approach to sustainable social interventions with a physical design component. At the University of Brighton, UK, an architectural design/build studio aimed at actual construction and transgressed the studio boundary to work closely with a charity supporting young refugees. In Norway, architecture students in an urbanism studio at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design surveyed an immigrant-dominated modernist housing district and proposed architectural and urban space interventions. Across the studios, student projects ranged from visualising futures to physical and social interventions. Learning outcomes varied, including design and planning skills, community engagement methods, co-design approaches and training in reflexivity. Venturing beyond the studio entailed engaging in sociocultural learning practices, engaging urban complexities and challenging expert authority and epistemologies in architecture and design education.

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Displacement and placemaking in design studios

Architecture_MPS. Vol. 21(1), 2022

This article explores how placemaking took place in architectural and design studios working with... more This article explores how placemaking took place in architectural and design studios working with migrant and displaced communities at universities in three countries. Placemaking is a dimension of architectural and urban design practice that is emulated in architectural design studios – and often takes the form of a top-down and expert-driven exercise. In contrast, bottom-up placemaking is constituted through spontaneous and everyday practices in a given locality. The studios engaged with social scientists with a particular focus on displaced and immigrant communities. In Delhi, a multi-disciplinary social design studio at Ambedkar University applied community engagement and a service design approach to sustainable social interventions with a physical design component. At the University of Brighton, UK, an architectural design/build studio aimed at actual construction and transgressed the studio boundary to work closely with a charity supporting young refugees. In Norway, architecture students in an urbanism studio at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design surveyed an immigrant-dominated modernist housing district and proposed architectural and urban space interventions. Across the studios, student projects ranged from visualising futures to physical and social interventions. Learning outcomes varied, including design and planning skills, community engagement methods, co-design approaches and training in reflexivity. Venturing beyond the studio entailed engaging in sociocultural learning practices, engaging urban complexities and challenging expert authority and epistemologies in architecture and design education.

This article has been peer-reviewed through the journal's standard double-blind peer review, where both the reviewers and authors are anonymised during review.

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Childhood, Youth, and Identity: A Roundtable Conversation from the Global South

by Hia Sen, Divya Kannan, Anandini Dar, and Shivani Nag

Journal of Childhood Studies, 2022

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