Paper short abstract:

This paper argues that the various documentary experiences of the poor residing in the city's margins are constitutive of 'pedagogies of gendered citizenship'. It explores the relationship between identity documents, forms of literacy and gendered frameworks of citizenship in Delhi's slum spaces.

Paper long abstract:

This paper argues that the various documentary experiences of the poor residing in the city's margins are constitutive of 'pedagogies of gendered citizenship'. By this, I mean that the various encounters of female slum residents with identification documents shape certain instrumental and symbolic forms of knowledge about the city, citizenship, governance and urban belonging. Urban poor encounters with identity documents produce 'piecemeal pedagogies' where slum residents try to educate each other about bureaucratic channels and application procedures in and through handling documents. Such encounters also yield thick knowledge about the city and gendered frameworks of access and entitlement. These arguments are made through an assessment of various forms of female literacy complicated by unequal social relations. This paper projects various documentary triggers of female literacy in the slum cluster, laying out various definitions of conventional and political literacy and what kind of piecemeal and thick pedagogies are rendered possible by the complex relationship between these literacies. The pedagogic process is framed by the unreliability of political patronage in the face of arbitrary selection of welfare beneficiaries, the fear of illegal migration, gender-neutral governance and the shifting economies of enumeration in a slum setting. I present this paper through a considered examination of ethnographic evidence of female slum residents testing the boundaries of literacy and citizenship against the backdrop of enumeration technologies in the past two decades in Delhi.

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