​ Within Childhood Research starkly different theoretical and empirical concerns characterize the global south-north divide. Hia Sen attempts to bridge the gap in Childhood Research which usually addresses childhoods differently according to their 'developing/developed', 'western/non-western' contexts, and finds its middle ground in the context of the urban middle classes in contemporary West Bengal. The author documents areas such as leisure practices and everyday lives of school children in India for three cohorts, where it is possible to have a comparative perspective of childhoods given the existing rich ethnographic and historical research on childhoods in other cultural contexts.

This edited volume brings together interdisciplinary scholarship on children’s everyday leisure from across the globe, addressing key questions around children’s agency, rights, child-adult relations, and social change. It is positioned to inaugurate a new frontier of research within leisure studies. Leisure theory has historically been adult-centric and based in the global north, and consequently, children’s lived experiences of leisure have remained marginal to theory-building exercises within leisure studies since its inception. As the call for decolonizing leisure studies grows, this book champions a cross-cultural and social justice agenda that does not privilege global north childhoods but acknowledges the multiplicity of lived childhoods across the globe and their inter-connections. By drawing attention to children’s leisure – across multiple genres such as organized leisure, sports, play, and digital leisure among others, this edited volume drives a new wave of research that speaks simultaneously to leisure studies and childhood studies and thereby advances the intellectual remit of global leisure studies.

This companion brings together scholars working at the intersection of media and class, with a focus on how understandings of class are changing in contemporary global media contexts. From the memes of and about working-class supporters of billionaire "populists", to well-publicized and critiqued philanthropic efforts to bring communication technologies into developing country contexts, to the behind-the-scenes work of migrant tech workers, class is undergoing change both in and through media. Diverse and thoughtfully curated contributions unpack how media industries, digital technologies, everyday media practices—and media studies itself—feed into and comment upon broader, interdisciplinary discussions. They cover a wide range of topics, such as economic inequality, workplace stratification, the sharing economy, democracy and journalism, globalization, and mobility/migration. Outward-looking, intersectional, and highly contemporary, The Routledge Companion to Media and Class is a must-read for students and researchers interested in the intersections between media, class, sociology, technology, and a changing world.

By regarding children as actors and conducting empirical research on children’s agency, Childhood Studies have gained significant influence on a wide range of different academic disciplines. This has made agency one of the key concepts of Childhood Studies, with articles on the subject featured in handbooks and encyclopaedias. Reconceptualising Agency and Childhood is the first collection devoted to the central concept of agency in Childhood Studies. With contributions from experts in the field, the chapters cover theoretical, practical, historical, transnational and institutional dimensions of agency, rekindling discussion and introducing fundamental and contemporary sociological perspectives to the field of research. Particular attention is paid to connecting agency in the social sciences with Childhood Studies, considering both the theoretical foundations and the practice of research into agency. Empirical case studies are also explored, which focus upon child protection, schools and childcare at a variety of institutions worldwide. This book is an essential reference for students and scholars of Childhood Studies, and is also relevant to Sociology, Social Work, Education, Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) and Geography. Chapter 6 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

Children’s leisure lives are changing, with increasing dominance of organised activities and screen-based leisure. These shifts have reconfigured parenting practices, too. However, our current understandings of these processes are race-blind and based mostly on the experiences of white middle-class families. Drawing on an innovative study of middle-class British Indian families, this book brings children’s and parents’ voices to the forefront and bridges childhood studies, family studies and leisure studies to theorise children’s leisure from a fresh perspective. Demonstrating the salience of both race and class in shaping leisure cultures within middle-class racialised families, this is an invaluable contribution to key sociological debates around leisure, childhoods and parenting ideologies.

This book familiarises readers with a new way to treat the subject of gender, foregrounding the real voices of women, their experiences doing ethnographic work, and their courage in sharing their stories publicly for the first time in the context of India. A useful companion to more theory-based anthropological studies, the book connects ethnographic data to what eventually becomes theories formed from the field. Chapters by women from a variety of disciplines – Anthropology, Literary and Translation studies, Political Sciences – transcend the academic boundaries between social sciences and humanities. The book shows how the researchers navigate in the field, write in ways that defy their academic life and work, and call into question their narrative voice. The book presents a space for women to reflect on their individual themes of research and at partially filling the vacuum mentioned above, the silences of women’s voices and expressions. The experiences described in the chapters differ, both along the divide of a "native" and a non-"native" fieldworker and along different disciplinary fields, but they share the experience of a long-term fieldwork in India and the need to self-reflect on the impact of this experience on the way the field is represented, on the people encountered in the field, on the way the field impacted on the fieldworker. The book is a useful presentation of how female researchers act in the field as women and scholars. Filling a gap in the existing literature of ethnographic research methods, the book will be of interest to students and researchers interested in the fields of Gender Studies, Social Work, Sociology, Anthropology and Asian Studies.

This open access edited volume investigates children and youth's deep entanglement in today's major global, national, and local transformations and processes: wherein they are not mere spectators and objects of transformations but instead actively shape them through various social, economic, and political representations. International contributions illuminate the problems that arise when children's rights and participation become a site of contestation and power over who represents whom, what, when, and where. The authors do not provide simple solutions, instead offering an understanding of the fundamental nature of these problems as founded in the application of rights and the nature of representation in modern society. Together, the authors emphasize that child representation must take into account the local and spatial context of how representations of children are discussed, as well as possible discrepancies between local, regional, national, and global processes.

This collection presents new work in risk media studies from critical humanities perspectives. Defining, historicizing, and consolidating current scholarship, the volume seeks to shape an emerging field, signposting its generative insights while examining its implicit assumptions. When and under what conditions does risk emerge? How is risk mediated? Who are the targets of risk media? Who manages risk? Who lives with it? Who are most in danger? Such questions—the what, how, who, when, and why of risk media—inform the scope of this volume. With roots in critical media studies and science and technology studies, it hopes to inspire new questions, perspectives, frameworks, and analytical tools not only for risk, media, and communication studies, but also for social and cultural theories. Editors Bishnupriya Ghosh and Bhaskar Sarkar bring together contributors who elucidate and interrogate risk media’s varied histories and futures. This book is meant for students and scholars of media and communication studies, science and technology studies, and the interdisciplinary humanities, looking either to deepen their engagement with risk media or to broaden their knowledge of this emerging field.

Is the bicycle, like the loudspeaker, a medium of communication in India? Do Indian children need trade unions as much as they need schools? What would you do with a mobile phone if all your friends were playing tag in the rain or watching Indian Idol? Children and Media in India illuminates the experiences, practices and contexts in which children and young people in diverse locations across India encounter, make, or make meaning from media in the course of their everyday lives. From textbooks, television, film and comics to mobile phones and digital games, this book examines the media available to different socioeconomic groups of children in India and their articulation with everyday cultures and routines. An authoritative overview of theories and discussions about childhood, agency, social class, caste and gender in India is followed by an analysis of films and television representations of childhood informed by qualitative interview data collected between 2005 and 2015 in urban, small-town and rural contexts with children aged nine to 17. The analysis uncovers and challenges widely held assumptions about the relationships among factors including sociocultural location, media content and technologies, and children’s labour and agency. The analysis casts doubt on undifferentiated claims about how new technologies ‘affect’, ‘endanger’ and/or ‘empower’, pointing instead to the importance of social class – and caste – in mediating relationships among children, young people and the poor. The analysis of children’s narratives of daily work, education, caring and leisure supports the conclusion that, although unrecognised and underrepresented, subaltern children’s agency and resourceful conservation makes a significant contribution to economic, interpretive and social reproduction in India.