Jiniya Afroze
The Open University, UK
I am a full-time PhD research student at the Faculty of Wellbeing, Education & Language Studies of The Open University, UK. My research project, funded by the Centre for Research in Education and Educational Technology (CREET), aims to explore everyday experiences of children who are living in an Urdu-speaking Bihari camp in Bangladesh. This research is framed within the sociology of childhood and children's geographies, which consider children's views in constructing knowledge about their socio-spatial lives. This research adopts an ethnographic approach with the combination of participatory methods of data production, including participant observation, semi-structured interviews, group discussions and key informant interviews.Prior to starting my PhD, I have worked on child protection programs with Save the Children in Bangladesh. Earlier, I completed my MA in International Communications and Development from City, University of London, with a distinction. My MA dissertation looked at the representation of gender in natural disaster news during disasters in Bangladeshi newspapers.
Objectives Significant research exists on violation of children’s right to protection. However, there is inadequate representations of children’s voices on their nuanced experiences of sociospatial vulnerabilities,... [ view full abstract ]
Objectives
Significant research exists on violation of children’s right to protection. However, there is inadequate representations of children’s voices on their nuanced experiences of sociospatial vulnerabilities, particularly in the context of Global South. This paper aims to bring out children’s narratives to explore how children experience sociospatial vulnerabilities in their everyday lives and how this shape their wellbeing in the context of an urban slum community in Bangladesh.
Methods
Drawing on data from an eight-month long ethnographic study of an ongoing PhD project, in an Urdu-speaking Bihari community in Bangladesh, this paper explores how children experience violence as part of their everyday culture and exercise their agencies in negotiating violence towards their wellbeing. Interpreting data from the perspectives of new sociology of childhood, combined with the evidence of empirical studies in children's geographies, this paper presents narrations of children and adults, from data collected through individual interviews, group discussions, and participant observations.
Results
This paper presents two issues. First, children’s understandings and experiences of violence are not static, rather negotiated and contested through children’s everyday experiences, along with their age, birth order, gender and generational relationships. Second, children construct and negotiate their agencies to respond to the culture of violence that they experience in relation to their ethnic-linguistic identities in that particular sociospatial context.
Conclusions
This paper highlights the importance of having a contextual understanding of violence in a sociospatial context, in favour of making flexible and situated understandings about how children explore and promote their own wellbeing.
