Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant: Work, Play, Race, and Childhood

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University of Michigan doctoral student Alysa Handelsman, under the guidance of Dr. Bruce Mannheim, will explore the interconnections between forms of play and work of Afro-descendant street children in Ecuador as a means of understanding how these children conceptualize their worlds, and how these conceptualizations challenge traditional theories of work, play, and childhood. Over 30 percent of Ecuador's population is under the age of 15, and, as of 2006, approximately 20 percent of the children in Ecuador live and work on the streets. This research investigates how poverty transforms play and produces children who act strategically in the face of uncertain survival and in the face of conflicting and competing expectations from caretakers, teachers, police officers, and other adults. Additionally, this work critically considers the ways race is experienced, learned, discussed, and imagined by Afro-descendant children -- a topic that is understudied by anthropologists, particularly in the context of the Andes. One of the major contributions of this research will be to show the links between economic circumstances, racial classifications, and conceptions of childhood. The research will demonstrate how these links are producing and regulating young people who must play and perform to survive by means of strategies and contexts that are configured quite differently from those of middle-class or wealthy children. Through 18 months of fieldwork, primarily in Guayaquil and partially in Esmeraldas, Handelsman will conduct research in NGOs, schools, streets, and street children's neighborhoods. She will employ social science methods such as participant observation, interviews, and focus groups. As an ethnographer, she is committed to conducting fieldwork in multiple spaces and contexts to provide diverse opportunities and venues for her research subjects to share their stories and ideas, and so will be utilizing many innovative methods, including a photovoice project. These mixed methods and settings form part of the collaborative nature of the project, as they enable the participation of the children in the research process. The research findings will be disseminated to community members, and the project will contribute to the training of a graduate student.