MINUSHREE SHARMASOCIOLOGY2014-01-312014-01-312013-01-14MINUSHREE SHARMA (2013-01-14). AGENTS OR VICTIMS?: EXPLORING THE EVERYDAY LIVES OF PAVEMENT AND SLUM DWELLING CHILDREN IN KOLKATA, INDIA. ScholarBank@NUS Repository.https://scholarbank.nus.edu.sg/handle/10635/49148Discussions of Indian children have commonly been constructed as issue-based, with a focus on problem categories such as `street children¿, `child labour¿, `child prostitution¿, or `children of commercial sex workers¿. Accounts have thus tended to submerge their everyday lives. This thesis, by contrast, explores in depth the everyday lives of pavement- and slum-dwelling children as experienced by themselves. Recognizing childhood as a social construction and children as active agents, this study adopts an ethically sensitive, rights-based participatory methodology in order to examine their own perspectives, experiences and actions, through which they construct their childhood, independent of or in relation to adults. My study shows that in spite of the challenges they face, these children are not passive sufferers. Rather, with varying degrees of help from parents, NGOs, and their own self-developed support networks, they manage to create for themselves semi-autonomous childhoods that demonstrate a blend of fun, imagination and innovativeness in their work, play and study.enchildren, pavement, slum, right based, participatory, kolkataThesisNOT_IN_WOS