ABSTRACT
This chapter considers childhood, children’s media consumption and media representation in South Asia through the lens of social class. Social class in South Asia is a highly complex and nuanced system, intercut by religion, violence, region, language and caste, and inflected by gender and the fact that many children participate in economic and social reproduction through waged and unwaged labor. Therefore, this chapter elaborates the ways in which the use of concepts and categories drawn from western perspectives on class and media fail to engage with the daily lives and experiences of working children in South Asia. Ranging over current scholarship, which focuses on emerging media and digital technologies in urban areas, the most connected children who are developing their own apps, as well as less prominent research on the lives of working class children in urban and rural areas, this chapter explains how whole groups of children and their parents are left out of media representation and from scholarly consideration.
