Divya Kannan – författare

Contested Childhoods traces a complex history of caste, race, education, and Christian missions in colonial south India. It draws upon the vast Protestant Christian missionary archives of the London Missionary Society, the Church Missionary Society, and the Basel German Evangelical Missionary Society to showcase the processes of negotiation, tensions, and underlying violence in the encounters between European 'outsiders' and local populations on the question of education. It examines the interplay of caste and education in reshaping ideas and norms of modern childhood and lower-caste community building in the regions of Travancore, Cochin, and Malabar. Set against a comparative historical perspective, the book argues for a greater focus on subaltern histories, especially the meanings and practices associated with educating poor, lower-caste children within the confines of formal schooling and beyond.

A timely enquiry into the disjuncture between schooling and society, this book aims to examine the specific spatialities and temporalities of modern schooling through which non-normative childhoods are constructed as the ‘provincial other’.A large body of critical scholarship has engaged with the ways in which modern schooling draws upon certain situated, normative ideals of child development and is uneasy in its attempts to accommodate childhoods that are situated outside of this normative framework. The COVID-19 pandemic, in fact, was a further reminder of how schooling, in its current form, is limited in its abilities to address childhoods that spatio-temporally disrupt the assumptions of the ‘normal’ and ‘stable’. Together, the authors of this edited volume examine the ways in which modern schooling, ‘excludes’, despite set policies for inclusion, and how ‘provincialized’ children respond to this. Cutting across a range of disciplines from history and anthropology to sociology and childhood studies, statistics and demography, and a range of research methodologies, from archival to ethnographic, the chapters draw upon these various disciplines in unpacking the structures of modern schooling.Modern Schooling and Trajectories of Exclusion will be a key resource for academics, researchers, and advanced students of education, sociology, research methods, childhood studies and social sciences. The chapters included in this book were originally published as a special issue of Children's Geographies.

A timely enquiry into the disjuncture between schooling and society, this book aims to examine the specific spatialities and temporalities of modern schooling through which non-normative childhoods are constructed as the ‘provincial other’.A large body of critical scholarship has engaged with the ways in which modern schooling draws upon certain situated, normative ideals of child development and is uneasy in its attempts to accommodate childhoods that are situated outside of this normative framework. The COVID-19 pandemic, in fact, was a further reminder of how schooling, in its current form, is limited in its abilities to address childhoods that spatio-temporally disrupt the assumptions of the ‘normal’ and ‘stable’. Together, the authors of this edited volume examine the ways in which modern schooling, ‘excludes’, despite set policies for inclusion, and how ‘provincialized’ children respond to this. Cutting across a range of disciplines from history and anthropology to sociology and childhood studies, statistics and demography, and a range of research methodologies, from archival to ethnographic, the chapters draw upon these various disciplines in unpacking the structures of modern schooling.Modern Schooling and Trajectories of Exclusion will be a key resource for academics, researchers, and advanced students of education, sociology, research methods, childhood studies and social sciences. The chapters included in this book were originally published as a special issue of Children's Geographies.

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.