Politics and Society in India and the Global South – serie

This book critically examines assumptions about age, women, and gender. Amidst all the attention that has been granted to difference and inequality, however uneven and unsatisfactory in terms of class and caste, race and ethnicity, sexuality and gender, disability, religion, and nation, questions of age and its importance for feminism have been less well defined. Drawing on recent literature on childhood, the chapters in this volume cover a range of fresh perspectives. These include:What kinds of biological, legal, chronological histories age has and the fundamental ways in which these links are being recastHow gender differences occupy a prominent place in historical constructions of identities, especially the frequent infantilisation of women, who are never seen as adults in the full sense of the term nor equally allowed to be children beyond the first years of lifeWays in which class, caste, gender, and ethnicity shaped classrooms and opportunities for education in the colonial period and the 20th century to produce new ideas of childhoodGendered outcomes for children in the context of a long entanglement of law with labour, transformations in practices of parenting over time, and how the concept of care emerged in both Western and non-Western societiesAn incisive study on how childhoods have come to be understood, this book will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of gender studies, childhood studies, family studies, modern history, legal history, social policy, social psychology, education, and sociology. This volume will also interest parents, paediatricians, family health providers, teachers and educators, and anyone who works with children.

This book critically examines assumptions about age, women, and gender. Amidst all the attention that has been granted to difference and inequality, however uneven and unsatisfactory in terms of class and caste, race and ethnicity, sexuality and gender, disability, religion, and nation, questions of age and its importance for feminism have been less well defined. Drawing on recent literature on childhood, the chapters in this volume cover a range of fresh perspectives. These include:What kinds of biological, legal, chronological histories age has and the fundamental ways in which these links are being recastHow gender differences occupy a prominent place in historical constructions of identities, especially the frequent infantilisation of women, who are never seen as adults in the full sense of the term nor equally allowed to be children beyond the first years of lifeWays in which class, caste, gender, and ethnicity shaped classrooms and opportunities for education in the colonial period and the 20th century to produce new ideas of childhoodGendered outcomes for children in the context of a long entanglement of law with labour, transformations in practices of parenting over time, and how the concept of care emerged in both Western and non-Western societiesAn incisive study on how childhoods have come to be understood, this book will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of gender studies, childhood studies, family studies, modern history, legal history, social policy, social psychology, education, and sociology. This volume will also interest parents, paediatricians, family health providers, teachers and educators, and anyone who works with children.

This volume traces how the discourse of skill evolved in colonial and postcolonial India, from the mid-nineteenth century to the present neoliberal era. It introduces the concept of skill ecology to capture the broader political, economic, and social environment within which skills emerge, transform, and acquire meaning. Skill is examined here not merely as a technical attribute but as a historically contingent category, shaped by state policy, capitalist ideologies, and hierarchies of power.Focusing on industrial training from the late colonial period – particularly the 1930s – through Nehruvian state-led industrialisation and into the era of neoliberal reform, the book explores how skilling became a terrain of collaboration and contestation between the state and the capital. It also reveals how social relations influence the legitimacy of skills, determining what forms of labour are seen as ‘skilled’ or ‘unskilled’ and for whom.Combining perspectives from history, political science, and colonial and postcolonial studies, this interdisciplinary work offers fresh insights into the politics of labour and development in South Asia. It will be essential reading for scholars and researchers in modern history, political science, sociology, economics, social policy, and Asian studies.