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Paper short abstract

This paper explores the post-colonial logics of carceral punishment through the lived experiences of street-connected youth. It demonstrates how youth resist necropolitics -- the politics of death -- to practice a politics of life that resists and challenges their exposure to death worlds.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines the everyday costs of necropolitical governance in India’s capital, Delhi. It does so through young people’s lived experiences and accounts of a post-colonial penal system and city that defines them as undesirable and expendable. The paper draws on over 3 years of multi-sited ethnographic and interview-based research with street-connected children and youth, their parents, and state and civil society representatives. The paper asks: What are the carceral logics and punishment practices that produce death worlds for children living and working in state contested spaces in urban India? How do children survive and resist the conditions of life that subject them to routinized violence? The children and youth whose voices inspire this paper, live and work in spaces that are contested and surveilled by the Delhi state. Their experiences of poverty, structural violence and social death are inseparable from their experiences of criminalization by the state, which they navigate in their residential spaces and sites of work and education. I argue that, in doing so, children and youth resist the logics of necropolitics – or the politics of death. They practice its inverse: a politics of life, through strategies of survival and resistance that challenge their routinized exposure to death worlds.