Anandini Dar | BML Munjal University (original) (raw)
Papers by Anandini Dar
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
Journal of Childhood Studies, 2022
The SAGE Encyclopedia of Children and Childhood Studies, 2020
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.
The Journal of Childhood Studies, 2022
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.
Children's Geographies, 2020
As the field of Childhood Studies remains rife with ethnographies on the agency of children, Toku... more As the field of Childhood Studies remains rife with ethnographies on the agency of children, Tokunaga’s book offers yet another deeply rich insight into the everyday lives of children. What is dist...
UNICEF, Indian Institute of Dalit Studies & Knowledge Community on Children in India (KCCI), 2007
Children in India, especially girl children, have been identified as one of the most vulnerable s... more Children in India, especially girl children, have been identified as one of the most vulnerable sections of society by the Government of India. With an existing caste system still in place, wherein the Dalits are continually victimised by means of exploitation, violence and discrimination, the Dalit girl children become even more vulnerable due to their triple identity of Dalit, child and girl.
This dissertation examines how ethnic youth centers and other sites between the home and the scho... more This dissertation examines how ethnic youth centers and other sites between the home and the school inform the everyday and political geographies of working class South Asian immigrant youth growing up in a post 9/11 New York. Caught between no longer being young children and not yet adults, the teens of this study spend much of their time in liminal spaces of youth centers, streets, malls, which I refer to as third spaces. Based on a multi-sited ethnography at one youth center for South Asian youth in Queens, New York between 2010 and 2012, I accompanied teens attending this center to other places where they hang out, such as, rallies and social justice and political workshops in NYC and other neighboring northeastern cities, malls, parks, subways, and online sites. Additionally, I analyze discourses of the mission, philosophy and ideologies of the youth center programs. After the 9/11 attacks on the world trade center in New York, ethnic and religious identities, that is, being South Asian and Muslim, have become racialized and politicized categories wrongfully associated with terrorism, resulting in racial bullying and hate vii crimes affecting South Asian youth and families. Unlike literature on youth centers, this research highlights how, in this era, ethnically-based youth centers address these sociopolitical and cultural difficulties youth face everyday and help them connect with and negotiate their socio-political realities without insulating or "islanding" young people. I argue that it is in third spaces that youth's political identities and engagement with politics begin to take shape as they attend social justice workshops and rallies to fight against racial crimes, and aspire to "go places," socially and politically. Further, I argue that youth's political agency manifests in their cultural and performative practices, offering new ways through which to understand young people's political lives. This dissertation highlights the connections between context, young people, representations, and politics, as it situates the constructions of racial and ethnic identity as intersecting dynamics to understanding youth's political geographies. This multidisciplinary study contributes to South Asian studies, political geographies, ethnic studies and children and youth studies scholarship. viii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS When I joined the only PhD granting program in Childhood Studies in North America in just its second year since inception, I was excited to conduct my research in this new innovative field but also felt I was at a disadvantage for not having any models for what a dissertation may look like in this multidisciplinary field. Fortunately, I had three phenomenal scholars on my committee who supported me in producing this dissertation that shapes the field. From the first day in the doctoral program till my dissertation defense day, Dr. Daniel Cook served as an inspiring model for how to be a critical and an innovative scholar. His sharp attention to detail, hard-hitting critique, as well as tips and advise about graduate school and academia have always been infused with playful witty banter, which reflects his unique and endearing style of advising. Interactions with him made the graduate research process productive, enduring, and memorable. I deeply cherish his friendship and astute mentorship. I was also fortunate enough to have not just one advisor but a co-advisor, Dr. Charles Watters, whose expansive knowledge of social and critical theory provided several lengthy and engaging advising sessions-across continentswherein my dissertation ideas were nourished and developed. His attention to the big picture and holistic research that pay attention to policy, praxis, and reflective research, parallel his beliefs about leading a balanced life as a researcher, which I have greatly appreciated and value deeply. His gentle demeanor and trust in me as an independent scholar consistently enabled me to stay true to my values of research that first brought me to the research program. ix Dr. Kathleen Hall put her faith in my research long before I knew what might ensue from this project. Her expertise on South Asian youth studies first led me to her for mentorship and her insights in this field pushed my research to new levels of inquiry. Dr. Hall offered me opportunities to benefit the resources at the University of Pennsylvania and introduced me to colleagues at this university who expanded the ways in which I envisioned my research. I am thankful for her warm and consistently supportive relationship. Beyond my committee, two other scholars deserve mention here as they offered feedback to a chapter of this dissertation and also provided me with journal articles that were not yet published and accessible to me. Dr. Spyros Spyrou and Dr. Tracey Skelton, your comments and feedback have been invaluable. I appreciate to have met you at various conferences that were the birthplaces of our sustained intellectual rapport. The Center for Race and Ethnicity at Rutgers University New Brunswick provided me with assistantship for the final year of my dissertation writing. This allowed me to focus on completing this project. The feedback on my chapters during the various weekly workshops held at the Center, contributed to improving the race and ethnicity analysis that is present in this dissertation. Mia Bay and Ann Fabian, thank you for this opportunity and for your careful and engaged comments. Relatives and friends, who hosted me, nourished me with food, music, and love, and supported me to complete my PhD, all deserve many thanks. Ravi mamu, Shivika, Sujata, Kiran aunty and Ashok uncle, Neena, Akanksha, Anuj bhai, and Raghavendra, I appreciate all the support each of you have offered me at different stages during my research and writing. Friends and colleagues, Susan Thomas, Sheena Sood, Donavan x Ramon, Kaia Shivers, and my colleagues in the department of Childhood Studies at Rutgers, offered me great feedback, asked tough questions about my research, and sometimes just simply made graduate school an exhilarating journey thanks to their company. Living in different neighborhoods of Philadelphia, New Jersey, and New York during this stage brought with it varied cultural experiences for me that enriched my thinking and writing. For this I am thankful to the wonderful libraries, coffee shops, conversations with the baristas, fellow coffee enthusiasts, as well as west Philadelphia's Foucault reading group. Enough cannot be said about the three pillars of support in my life who have always wanted nothing but the best for me, even when we may not have agreed on what that may look like for me. My brother, Utsav, and my parents, Ravi and Swaroop, supported my higher education plans and encouraged me to complete my dissertation in some very trying times by constantly offering words of support, wisdom, and love. Thank you for your faith in me and for giving me the values I stand by today that have helped produce this dissertation. All three of you have taught me to aspire for excellence and be a good human being. Apko dher sara pyar, hamesha! Finally, if it were not for the youth who agreed to participate in this study and for the staff members who allowed me entry into their lives and the youth center in New York, which is the primary field site for this ethnographic study, this project may not have been possible. You all taught me how to be humble, caring, and open hearted, and helped me balance the multiple roles I played as a volunteer, sister, international researcher, and mentor while I conducted my research. I thank you for allowing me entry into your cultural practices, everyday lives, and for sharing with me your struggles and xi achievements. Your honest interactions and rapport with me showed me how resilient one can be when they have a community that supports them. I dedicate this dissertation to the Desi teenagers of New York.
Childhood: A journal of global child research; Sage Publications, 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.
Cultural Sociology of the Middle East, Asia, & Africa: An Encyclopedia, 2012
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
Journal of Childhood Studies, 2022
The SAGE Encyclopedia of Children and Childhood Studies, 2020
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.
The Journal of Childhood Studies, 2022
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.
Children's Geographies, 2020
As the field of Childhood Studies remains rife with ethnographies on the agency of children, Toku... more As the field of Childhood Studies remains rife with ethnographies on the agency of children, Tokunaga’s book offers yet another deeply rich insight into the everyday lives of children. What is dist...
UNICEF, Indian Institute of Dalit Studies & Knowledge Community on Children in India (KCCI), 2007
Children in India, especially girl children, have been identified as one of the most vulnerable s... more Children in India, especially girl children, have been identified as one of the most vulnerable sections of society by the Government of India. With an existing caste system still in place, wherein the Dalits are continually victimised by means of exploitation, violence and discrimination, the Dalit girl children become even more vulnerable due to their triple identity of Dalit, child and girl.
This dissertation examines how ethnic youth centers and other sites between the home and the scho... more This dissertation examines how ethnic youth centers and other sites between the home and the school inform the everyday and political geographies of working class South Asian immigrant youth growing up in a post 9/11 New York. Caught between no longer being young children and not yet adults, the teens of this study spend much of their time in liminal spaces of youth centers, streets, malls, which I refer to as third spaces. Based on a multi-sited ethnography at one youth center for South Asian youth in Queens, New York between 2010 and 2012, I accompanied teens attending this center to other places where they hang out, such as, rallies and social justice and political workshops in NYC and other neighboring northeastern cities, malls, parks, subways, and online sites. Additionally, I analyze discourses of the mission, philosophy and ideologies of the youth center programs. After the 9/11 attacks on the world trade center in New York, ethnic and religious identities, that is, being South Asian and Muslim, have become racialized and politicized categories wrongfully associated with terrorism, resulting in racial bullying and hate vii crimes affecting South Asian youth and families. Unlike literature on youth centers, this research highlights how, in this era, ethnically-based youth centers address these sociopolitical and cultural difficulties youth face everyday and help them connect with and negotiate their socio-political realities without insulating or "islanding" young people. I argue that it is in third spaces that youth's political identities and engagement with politics begin to take shape as they attend social justice workshops and rallies to fight against racial crimes, and aspire to "go places," socially and politically. Further, I argue that youth's political agency manifests in their cultural and performative practices, offering new ways through which to understand young people's political lives. This dissertation highlights the connections between context, young people, representations, and politics, as it situates the constructions of racial and ethnic identity as intersecting dynamics to understanding youth's political geographies. This multidisciplinary study contributes to South Asian studies, political geographies, ethnic studies and children and youth studies scholarship. viii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS When I joined the only PhD granting program in Childhood Studies in North America in just its second year since inception, I was excited to conduct my research in this new innovative field but also felt I was at a disadvantage for not having any models for what a dissertation may look like in this multidisciplinary field. Fortunately, I had three phenomenal scholars on my committee who supported me in producing this dissertation that shapes the field. From the first day in the doctoral program till my dissertation defense day, Dr. Daniel Cook served as an inspiring model for how to be a critical and an innovative scholar. His sharp attention to detail, hard-hitting critique, as well as tips and advise about graduate school and academia have always been infused with playful witty banter, which reflects his unique and endearing style of advising. Interactions with him made the graduate research process productive, enduring, and memorable. I deeply cherish his friendship and astute mentorship. I was also fortunate enough to have not just one advisor but a co-advisor, Dr. Charles Watters, whose expansive knowledge of social and critical theory provided several lengthy and engaging advising sessions-across continentswherein my dissertation ideas were nourished and developed. His attention to the big picture and holistic research that pay attention to policy, praxis, and reflective research, parallel his beliefs about leading a balanced life as a researcher, which I have greatly appreciated and value deeply. His gentle demeanor and trust in me as an independent scholar consistently enabled me to stay true to my values of research that first brought me to the research program. ix Dr. Kathleen Hall put her faith in my research long before I knew what might ensue from this project. Her expertise on South Asian youth studies first led me to her for mentorship and her insights in this field pushed my research to new levels of inquiry. Dr. Hall offered me opportunities to benefit the resources at the University of Pennsylvania and introduced me to colleagues at this university who expanded the ways in which I envisioned my research. I am thankful for her warm and consistently supportive relationship. Beyond my committee, two other scholars deserve mention here as they offered feedback to a chapter of this dissertation and also provided me with journal articles that were not yet published and accessible to me. Dr. Spyros Spyrou and Dr. Tracey Skelton, your comments and feedback have been invaluable. I appreciate to have met you at various conferences that were the birthplaces of our sustained intellectual rapport. The Center for Race and Ethnicity at Rutgers University New Brunswick provided me with assistantship for the final year of my dissertation writing. This allowed me to focus on completing this project. The feedback on my chapters during the various weekly workshops held at the Center, contributed to improving the race and ethnicity analysis that is present in this dissertation. Mia Bay and Ann Fabian, thank you for this opportunity and for your careful and engaged comments. Relatives and friends, who hosted me, nourished me with food, music, and love, and supported me to complete my PhD, all deserve many thanks. Ravi mamu, Shivika, Sujata, Kiran aunty and Ashok uncle, Neena, Akanksha, Anuj bhai, and Raghavendra, I appreciate all the support each of you have offered me at different stages during my research and writing. Friends and colleagues, Susan Thomas, Sheena Sood, Donavan x Ramon, Kaia Shivers, and my colleagues in the department of Childhood Studies at Rutgers, offered me great feedback, asked tough questions about my research, and sometimes just simply made graduate school an exhilarating journey thanks to their company. Living in different neighborhoods of Philadelphia, New Jersey, and New York during this stage brought with it varied cultural experiences for me that enriched my thinking and writing. For this I am thankful to the wonderful libraries, coffee shops, conversations with the baristas, fellow coffee enthusiasts, as well as west Philadelphia's Foucault reading group. Enough cannot be said about the three pillars of support in my life who have always wanted nothing but the best for me, even when we may not have agreed on what that may look like for me. My brother, Utsav, and my parents, Ravi and Swaroop, supported my higher education plans and encouraged me to complete my dissertation in some very trying times by constantly offering words of support, wisdom, and love. Thank you for your faith in me and for giving me the values I stand by today that have helped produce this dissertation. All three of you have taught me to aspire for excellence and be a good human being. Apko dher sara pyar, hamesha! Finally, if it were not for the youth who agreed to participate in this study and for the staff members who allowed me entry into their lives and the youth center in New York, which is the primary field site for this ethnographic study, this project may not have been possible. You all taught me how to be humble, caring, and open hearted, and helped me balance the multiple roles I played as a volunteer, sister, international researcher, and mentor while I conducted my research. I thank you for allowing me entry into your cultural practices, everyday lives, and for sharing with me your struggles and xi achievements. Your honest interactions and rapport with me showed me how resilient one can be when they have a community that supports them. I dedicate this dissertation to the Desi teenagers of New York.
Childhood: A journal of global child research; Sage Publications, 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.
Cultural Sociology of the Middle East, Asia, & Africa: An Encyclopedia, 2012
My Name is Today, Vol 16, 2009
Part of the book series: Studies in Childhood and Youth (SCY), 2023
This edited volume advances the conceptual framework of the 'everyday urban' to unpack the ways i... more This edited volume advances the conceptual framework of the 'everyday urban' to unpack the ways in which processes of modernity in India shape young subjects and, in so doing, centers the analytical categories of childhood and youth. In rejecting simplistic binaries of agency, and teleological logics of development and modernity, the authors focus on the complex pathways of negotiation and conflict that mark the lives of young people across various historical and contemporary contexts in urban India. Chapters are organized across two key themes: Shaping Modern Subjects and Being Modern Subjects, while spanning multiple disciplines including anthropology, history, sociology, disability studies, and psychology. Together, the contributions aim to advance the field of childhood and youth studies in South Asia and beyond.