Introduction

Childhood remains a contested subject. With capitalist forces and neoliberal agendas driving forth the ‘global child’, universal development, and massification of education, tensions around the notions of childhood across the local–global and North–South divide have become emphasised. Social constructions of an ‘ideal’ childhood, countered by scholarship primarily from the South, have since matured and diversified in the 21st century, which may otherwise have been ‘impervious to enlightened insights’ (Nieuwenhuys, 2008, p 4) emerging from the rich peripheries of the majority worlds (Connell, 2007). Only by problematising ‘childhood essentialisms’ (Nieuwenhuys, 2010), ‘global coloniality’ (Escobar, 2008) in knowledge production and legitimisation, and reifying structural disjuncture, can a move beyond the monocultural logics (Santos, 2008) of childhood, and research with children and young people, begin to take shape and cater to difference (see Barad, 2007; Chen, 2010; Burman, 2019; de Castro 2020).

In recent years, post-developmental, postcolonial, and posthuman scholars and researchers have foregrounded the distinct material, geographical, social, discursive, and political conditions within which a myriad of childhoods occur and are constructed at the peripheries. The childhoods observed within this chapter remain entangled with such shifting and unequal topographies, which contour their lived worlds. It draws on my postdoctoral experiences and postgraduate research studies with children in disadvantaged and marginalised contexts of India between the years 2011 and 2019. A particular focus is cast on the indigenous Hill Sabar children of Jharkhand to contrast their embodied difference in contextual particularities with the hegemonic, globalised notion of childhood. The first section accordingly highlights how normativity reproduces essentialisms in thinking about childhoods at the peripheries. This is discussed in relation to postcolonial perspectives, briefly interrogating modernity and its habitual constructions of ‘other’ children, towards reframing the ‘singularity of stories’ (Balagopalan, 2019, p 231).

Reflections on these issues lead chapter discussions to meaningful ways of researching with children. At the core of such precedence is children’s voice about the social phenomenon of interest. Here, research is thus understood as a social process, contoured by power and privilege, which urges strategies for reflexivity framed by the relational and ontological contexts of childhoods examined.