Drawing from ethnographic research, this book presents children’s lived experience of poverty and vulnerability in Kenya. By taking the case of Siaya, Kenya, which has some of the lowest indicators of child well-being, the book presents children’s complex lived experience from three interlinked everyday spaces of the home, the school and support programmes.
It argues that children’s experience is formed at the interstices of material lack, historically as well as politically located factors and the complex context of social relations. The book is anchored in an innovative methodology of listening softly to children’s voice. Aimed at fully capturing children’s experience, listening softly focusses on the different ways that children’s voice happen. The book challenges scholarship to go beyond multi-dimensionality and re-imagine children’s experience as complex and entangled, use methods that are attuned to capturing children’s messy experience of poverty, and be ‘widely awake’ in each intervention context to capture the emergent fluid experience of children.
Presenting a non-linear, contextual, entangled and complex experience of poverty and vulnerability, this book will be of interest to scholars and students in the field of Poverty Studies, Development Studies, Childhood Studies, Social Policy, Critical studies, Human and Child Rights and African Studies.
Table of Contents:
1. Introduction: Rethinking Children’s Lived Experience of Poverty and Vulnerability 2. A Genealogy of Policies on Poor and Vulnerable Children and Youth in Kenya 3. Listening Softly to Children’s Voice: Generating Cartographies of Children’s Experience of Poverty 4. Caring for Children in Marginalised Spaces 5. Who are the Poor and Vulnerable Children? Rhizomatic Categories 6. Cartographies of Children’s Schooling Experience 7. The Politics of Needs Construction in Support programmes 8. Subjectivating Practices in Programmes of Support and Messy Agency by Children 9. Conclusion: Children’s Lived Experience of Poverty as an Entanglement
About the Author :
Elizabeth Ngutuku is a Researcher at the Firoz Lalji Institute for Africa at the London School of Economics and Political Science, UK.
Review :
Children’s Lived Experience of Poverty and Vulnerability considers the complexities, entanglements and fluidity of existing frameworks and categorizations in child poverty and vulnerability. Written in a clear and engaging style and meticulously crafted arguments , the book offers highly original and stimulating insights into the field of childhood and children’s rights studies.
Karl Hanson, Director of the Centre for Children’s Rights Studies, University of Geneva, Switzerland
This exceptionally argued book, children’s lived experience of poverty and vulnerability provides an interesting reading about changing representations of childhood in resource-limited settings in Africa. These perspectives that draw from locally embedded notions of childhood, parenthood and poverty have significant implications for child protection policy processes
Erick Otieno Nyambedha, Professor of Anthropology, Maseno University, Kenya
Children’s lived experience of poverty and vulnerability draws on children’s voice to frame their experience. The nuanced injustices, inequities and resilience provided complexify the realities of growing up in an African context. It is a must-read for policymakers, teachers, postgraduate students and others who work with children.
HB Ebrahim, UNESCO Co-chair and Research Professor for Early Childhood, University of South Africa
The book Children’s lived experience of poverty and vulnerability draws from award-winning ethnographic research. Written in a lucid and engaging style, it is a must-read for those interested in epistemic justice for children, the epistemologies of the South, poverty and social justice debates for children.
Auma Okwany, Associate Professor of Social Policy The International Institute of Social Studies of Erasmus University Rotterdam, Netherlands
