‘Managing’ Poverty: Care and Control in Peruvian Street Children’s Everyday Lives

Summary

This PhD thesis is available to read from the University of Washington’s digital repository.

This dissertation examines the contradictory and complementary ways in which both neoliberal development and children’s rights legislation shape national development and child poverty in Lima and Cusco, Perú. It uses childhood as a lens through which to more critically analyze struggle over meanings of development, poverty and appropriate uses of public space, looking at the ways in which children’s rights and neoliberalism shape the regulation of poor children through a number of spaces, including social services, urban space, and street children’s everyday lives. The project is based on 14 months of in-depth ethnographic research, participant observation and interviews with street children, as well as conversations with policy makers, educators, government officials and social workers. My research design was specifically concerned with both recognizing children as active producers of knowledge and with connecting their everyday experiences with broader systemic changes and processes of development and governance. Rather than focusing on either a macro-scale or a more localized analysis, it links the subjectivity of the poor both with political-economic shifts and discourses and with identity projects. By focusing on street children’s everyday lives, this dissertation combines work on the governance of poverty, most of which has remained focused on the global north, with insights from critical development scholars regarding a need for a historical and sociopolitical account of poverty to actively politicize the ways in which Peruvian street children negotiate control, care and survival.