ABSTRACT
There is wide recognition in studies of childhood that the abstract universalism of the ‘poor child’ in education and development discourses fails to adequately acknowledge, much less address, the diversity of childhood experiences in different contexts. The notion of ‘multiple childhoods’ has gained much traction in childhood studies, as a way to capture the plurality of children's lived experiences, and to signal the importance of understanding the contexts of those lives for assembling policy and research agendas (James et al. 1998; Jenks 2008). As Indian childhood studies scholar Sarada Balagopalan observes in her recent book, the notion of ‘multiple childhoods’ has produced research ‘that over the years denaturalised the assumed universality of concepts like biological age, adult-child differentiation, notions of childcare and children's work, and the affective investments that adults make in children’ (Balagopalan 2014, 12). While this is an important project that has eschewed ‘a pathological reading of children's lives in the non-west’ (12), Balagopalan notes that the liberal tolerance of plurality implied through notions of ‘multiple childhoods’ has inadvertently de-linked children's lives from the workings of power and ‘placed their cultural worlds as largely outside of history, the state and the market’ (12). In this chapter, I take up this concern by exploring the limitations of a pluralistic reading of ‘multiple childhoods’ with respect to education development reforms, particularly in poor rural Indian communities.
