Children’s Experiences with Agency in an Indigenous Community in Chhattisgarh, India

This research is an exploration of children’s everyday lives in an indigenous community (Pahari Korwa) in Chhattisgarh, India. It aims to understand how children engage with hardships and risks in their everyday lives, and negotiate agency. I use ethnography as a methodological approach to capture the various elements of children’s daily lives and experiences through observations, conversations, drawings and photographs.
I unpack and explore the relational and interdependent nature of children’s agency, and take this discussion further empirically through illustrating how agency is not possessed by individuals but enabled through their embodied interactions with the physical spaces they occupy, the material objects they interact with and the people they encounter.
This thesis illustrates that children’s everyday sites of encounter are not rigid but porous. It demonstrates how children explore risks by assessing a situation and relying on their bodily capacities, building a discussion for a relational understanding of the body. Children in the study engaged with everyday mundane objects ingeniously, in ways that enabled their agency, as did everyday interactions with other adults and children, through collaboration, interdependence, resistance and negotiations. The thesis also highlights the intersections of caste and gender in children’s everyday experiences, making space to discuss intersectionality within childhood studies.
The contribution to theoretical knowledge lies in the understanding of agency beyond the binaries of the human and non-human, through assemblages, and in the kinds of children’s agency ranging from more routine agencies, demonstrated in the presence of adults, to more inventive agencies, that children experienced with their peers and siblings. The overall contribution of the thesis lies in the rich descriptions of children’s lives, discussing the intricacies of how agency is produced (or not) in their context.