ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a perspective on how the identity of the poor and vulnerable child is articulated in day-to-day discourse and interactions through specific practices in contemporary programmes of support. These practices, often seen as requirements for participation or conditionalities, offer particular ways of being a child generally and a poor and vulnerable child in particular. These discursive practices position children as subjects with specific capacities and identities. While children and their caregivers may take the subject positions offered to them and become subjectified, they engage with, negotiate, resist or subvert these subject positionings. The chapter therefore presents the embodied and embedded experience of children and their agency and creativity in responding to or navigating the dominant representations of their needs, rights, identity and experience in organizations or programmes of support. These actions are presented as the different ways that children claim and reposition their rights and enact their identity differently.
