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Shows how children in Bangladesh's factories, fields, and schools learn, resist, and make their voices heard in hazardous conditions.
Children's Ways of Knowing offers an unprecedented look into the lives of children working in factories and fields and going to school in Bangladesh. Naheed Natasha Mansur uses an innovative video-cued ethnographic approach that enables children to revisit and reflect on filmed moments, positioning them as coproducers of knowledge and authorities on their everyday experiences of labor, education, and survival. Blending vivid storytelling with rigorous analysis, Mansur reveals the subtle forms of resistance children employ and the ways their knowledge challenges dominant assumptions about childhood, work, and development. Avowedly decolonial and comparative in juxtaposing rural and urban settings, Children's Ways of Knowing critiques global and local structures that marginalize young laborers while highlighting their agency and creativity. Essential reading for scholars of anthropology, education, labor studies, and South Asia, the book also speaks to policymakers and activists by insisting on the need to center and listen to children's voices.
"This book makes an important contribution to comparative and international education and childhood studies, particularly through its careful, ethically grounded use of video-cued, multi-vocal ethnography and its commitment to centering children's voices and understandings." — Caroline Manion, University of Toronto
Naheed Natasha Mansur holds a PhD from The Pennsylvania State University. She uses innovative methodologies such as video-cued ethnography to advance research and advocacy for children.
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
ACRONYMS
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
PART I: FRAMING THE INQUIRY
1. Listen to What the Children Say
2. Policy Architecture and the Structural Production of Child Labor
3. Toward a Methodology for Epistemic Justice: Children's Knowledge Production and Video-cued Ethnography
PART II: LIVED CHILDHOODS IN HAZARDOUS LABOR
4. "No Bad Days and a Visa for Death": Candles, Cake, and Children's Strategic Performance as Factory Workers
5. Producing Resistance: Working Children of the Dry Fish Fields
6. The Girl in Between: Labor, Dowry, and Marriage
PART III: INEQUITIES IN THE EDUCATION LANDSCAPE
7. Contested Access and Costs of Schooling
8. Class and the Classroom: How Social Hierarchies Produce Educational Exclusion
9. Children as epistemic authorities of the present: Contesting parental hope in hazardous labor
CONCLUSION: PATHWAYS FORWARD
Coming Dawn: Leading with Children's Knowledge
APPENDIX: NOTES ON PARTICIPANTS
BIBLIOGRAPHY