ABSTRACT
Categories are essential in policymaking and in understanding the lived experience of poverty and vulnerability. However, these categories sometimes standardize experience and do not tell us more about the processes of vulnerabilization. This chapter engages with the vital question of who the poor and vulnerable children are. The chapter takes the heuristic entry points of the already constituted categories of poor and vulnerable children and brings them into an encounter with the lived experience of children. The illustrations provided in this chapter demonstrate the difficulties in tidying up children's experience, reveal the entanglements in these categories and engage the dominant categorizing practices. The chapter also surfaces children's agency as they come to terms with specific definitions and difficult material contexts. The fluid experience of children, as presented here, shows the need for being attuned to the intricacies, indeterminacies and contingencies of children's experience in specific contexts.
