UC EVENTS

Seminar title: Writers, Poets, Artists and Performers: A New History of Children’s Participation in International Development

Abstract: Children, whether in the global north or the global south have long been active participants in development programs. This paper introduces a new research project that uses child-authored materials— stories, poems and other materials produced by children in a range of development organisations—as the primary sources for an alternative children’s history of development over a hundred-year period (1920 – 2020). Seeking to challenge prevailing assumptions that children are simply the ‘objects’ of development interventions, this project highlights children’s active transnational roles creating and producing development. Alongside child authored materials the project also explores the techniques and tools used to elicit and direct children’s participation toward adult agendas and ‘developmentally’ appropriate affects and effects. In this talk I will introduce a range of child authored materials, explore the contexts of their production and explore some of the key methodological questions that arise in the production of a children’s history of development. 

Speaker bio: Annie McCarthy is an Assistant Professor in Global Studies at the University of Canberra.  She works at the intersection of anthropology, childhood studies and development studies and is the author of a new book Children and NGOs in India: Development as Storytelling and Performance (2021). Her new research project seeks to historically contextualise her ethnographic work on children’s participation in NGO programs in contemporary Delhi and look historically at children’s role as co-producers and creators of development through archival research with development materials over a hundred year period (1920-2020).