Children’s Digital Experiences in Indian Slums by Bhatia, Kiran Vinod;

Technologies, Identities, and Jugaad

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Product details:

Edition number 1
Publisher Routledge
Date of Publication 1 December 2025

ISBN 9781041176749
Binding Paperback
No. of pages180 pages
Size 234x156 mm
Language English

Short description:

Long description:

This book departs from the universalising and rescue narratives of poor children and technologies. It offers complex stories on how children’s social identities (gender, caste, and religion), cultural norms, and personal aspirations influence their digital experiences. How do children challenge, circumvent, or reinforce the dominant sociocultural norms in their engagements with digital technologies? What can we learn about digital technologies and poor children’s jugaad and aspirations in the urban sprawls of India? This book explores these questions ethnographically by focusing on how children in three urban slums in India access technologies, inhabit online spaces, and personalise their digital experiences, networks, and identity articulations based on their values and aspirations. It utilises insights from studies on jugaad, expression, and sociality to argue that poor children’s material realities, community relations, and aspirations for leisure, class mobility, and belongingness profoundly shape their engagements with digital technologies.

This well-argued and powerfully articulated work provides a provocative critique of the accepted notions of children's agency. The author offers rich insights based on immersive fieldwork through a nuanced treatment of the Jugaad culture that acts as a strategic and constitutive force in these children's quotidian negotiations. The book is a must-read for anyone interested in the global South or young people's digital cultures. Manisha Pathak-Shelat, Professor, Communication and Digital Media & Strategies, MICA and Co-Author of Gen Z, Digital Media, and Transcultural Lives.

This book masterfully speaks about the majority of the world's youth living outside the West, who have fast become the biggest digital users and online creators. Digital anthropologist Bhatia impressively weaves a new imaginary of their online engagements that are both global and granular and serves as a counternarrative to legacy understandings of such demographics as utility-driven. This book is an essential read for those interested in building global policies and platforms that take into account the rest of the world., Payal Arora, Professor at Utrecht University and Author of 'Next Billion Users'.

1. Introduction, 2. Living in a Technological Utopia, 3. Fair is Lovely; Boys will be Boys: Notes on Gender, Class, and Technologies, 4. (Non)Negotiating Caste in Digital Encounters, 5. Digital Traces of Religious Identities: On Belongingness and Anxiety, 6. Inhabiting A Digital Dystopia? Index, About the Author.

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