Project description

The following study was based on ten ethnographic interviews with children working attempts to add new variables into the current discourse surrounding street children by exploring the imaginative ways children get and keep access to care on the street under conditions of deprivation. This study seeks to ethnographically capture the positions that can be occupied by different actors in the space of care and their dynamic relationships. It focuses on how care emerges, and in which forms it does so, at the intersection of a variety of relationships framed by work in the lives of ten children selling small items in the Cola Intersection and surrounding neighborhoods in Beirut.
The study contributes to the urgent task of building a more robust profile of children working on the street in Lebanon. The ethnographic data produced in this research provides an emphasis on the child’s point of view. It is a child-centered approach in examining street work. The thesis helps paint a clearer picture of the needs, vulnerabilities, and opportunities encountered by children while trying to improve their well-being and that of their families. The study also works towards developing the concept of care as a survival strategy that may not be stable, but that is produced in the flow of real life. Care in this existential sense is used to connect social life, culture, politics, and economics in the local worlds of children overwhelmed with adult responsibilities. The realities of the childhoods of street working children revealed in the study have vital implications for the nature of services and protection programs that can be designed to support them.

Researchers

Keywords

Applied sociology Cultural sociology Sociology of childhood Sociology of immigration Ethnography