Embedding the Global Womb: Global Child Labour and the New Policy Agenda

Abstract

Unevenly distributed symbolic resources misrecognize children's lifeworlds in favour of a mythical global order. As new policy agenda representations of child labour in the global south hold out the promise of a labour-free global childhood, children's day-to-day work routines are denied. These routines are typically located in hidden landscapes of reproduction (the 'global womb'). Retracing the historical and territorial itinerary of child labour I highlight the child saving rituals set in place to demarcate today's borderline between the global womb and global childhood. Children's lifeworlds are trapped in the logic of a self-reproducing workforce for which rituals of child labour abolition summon up the ever-receding mirage of a better life.