Wandering off the Road to the End of Child Labor

Abstract

In conventional development discourse, western concern for overworked children follows a root/branch mapping: the ‘root cause’ of child labor is seen as poverty, and child labor, in turn, becomes a cause of economic vulnerability and ‘lost childhood’. Such analysis fails to consider the ways in which children's subjectivities and practical work have already been shaped by neoliberal discourses. This article contributes to an emerging critique of conventional western notions of childhood in relation to global capitalist development by re-visiting the category of child labor, through a Deleuzian lens. The analysis will employ images of working children and policy texts to explore the ways in which they territorialize the working child. In particular, the author draws upon the metaphor of the rhizome and notions of becoming, in an effort to open an alternative cartography of children's work, exploring what work the category of child labor does in international policy discourse and what's at stake in its unsettling.