Critical omissions: How street children studies can address self-destructive agency

Summary

This is a chapter of the book Research With Children: Perspectives and Practices, edited by Pia Christensen and Allison James and published by Routledge. It has been made available to read online by the author.

This chapter makes a plea for researching street children with ethnographic depth and vision. With the former I refer to the detailed and longitudinal fieldwork of street ethnography, and with the latter I mean a vision of how street children relate to society. There is room for the street-ethnographic vision, I argue, if it is seen in contradistinction to the two main discourses current in the literature. These two types of discourse, the institutional and the critical/activist, are discussed, and through a series of five statements I suggest how street ethnography can offer a different and a better perspective. My central argument is that research on street children must pay attention to the paradoxes of self-destructive agency inherent in street children’s lives.