Resilient Childhoods

Resilient Childhoods is a long-term visual anthropology research project conducted in Bolivia, initially centered on working children’s unions and their members. It evolved to depict the lifeworlds of children and adolescents beyond the realm of work. The project provides a critical perspective on child labour and how discourse surrounding this issue is shaped in the Global North. 

Spanning my MPhil and PhD research at the Universities of Tromsø (2013-15) and Bern (2017-23), this project involved fieldwork and filming in Bolivia during 2014, 2018 and 2019.

The hybrid and multimodal manuscript of my PhD dissertation, titled Navigating the Path to Adulthood: Between Resilience and Vulnerability. Audiovisual Research with Working Children and Adolescents in Urban Bolivia is currently in the process of publication. Please feel free contact me to access the prototype version.

The working children’s movement

The core of this project are the NATs,  independent working children and adolescents in Bolivia, who actively participate in the Bolivian national working children’s movement UNATsBO  (unión de niñas, niños y adolescentes trabjadores de Bolivia). This grassroots union of working children advocates for their recognition and protection as legitimate workers by the Bolivian state. In doing so, they champion dignified working conditions for children and adolescents who have no choice but to work alongside or instead of attending school. They call for more participation in the political arena and a shift in perspective regarding national and international policies aimed at “eradicating” child labour. 

Through extensive fieldwork using videography and photography as playful and creative tools, the lived experiences and subjectivities of adolescents are depicted. The formats vary according to subject and topic and reaches from audio-interviews to sensorial and observational videos and staged fictions. Their perspectives on labour, dignified work, family, gender, violence and strategic resilience are used to inform the concept of ‘colonial childhoods’ – and how development politics and the definitions of “childhood” in the Global North affect the principal concerned of this cause.

With this work, I integrate the tools of visual anthropology, biographical and evocative storytelling into the field of childhood studies and proposes a methodological contribution on how to conduct creative research with children and adolescents in precarious settings. It demonstrates how audio-visual tools make imaginaries and lived experiences tangible and the ways to conduct research “with” and not “about” a researched group.

This work also prompts reflection on the constructions of relationships between the researcher and the researched. The video camera as a colonial apparatus is questioned and deconstructed, as much as the limitations of linear ethnographic text as a representation method. 

The audio-visual content within anthropological text doesn’t play an illustrative role but is presented as an equal part of the research corpus and thus suggests the importance and the added value of multimodality in contemporary research.

Ultimately, Resilient Childhoods proposes alternative perspectives on childhood through a decolonial lens, and a discursive approach to the different current definitions of work and childhood.