Alex George is going to present a working paper on 'Accessing Mobility and the Promises of Success in School: analysis of childhood memories'

Paper focuses on a selection of memories regarding childhood and youth of two individuals who are 50 and 45 years old. The interviews focused on their everyday life in school or outside it with friends, family and work. Both of them belong to rural households and achieved some social mobility. The occupation of their parents and caste differed. Case 1 transitions from being a child labour after becoming a school dropout, and finally becoming a driver. His father was a wage labourer and of the OBC caste. Case 2 belongs to one of the Dalit family clusters whose intergenerational mobility is discussed elsewhere. He went to the college for a year, and marries the same year, takes up various jobs and finally at age 42 gets a permanent job. His father was a first-generation learner and amongst the first in his family to move out of the traditional occupation of hide/ leather processing. Father was a Class IV employee in the government sector who lived in a village. Case 2’s father and Case 1 belong to the same village. Majority of Dalits and Adivasis who benefitted from government’s reservation policy were employed in the Class IV employment which largely involved physical labour. Both faced different challenges in growing up in the context of schooling as following: illiteracy of the parents; individual’s position in the birth order in the family; attitude of their teachers; presence or absence of educational infrastructure; limited exposure and information regarding possible careers; etc.

The previous research has analysed experiences of marginalisation in various forms of life narratives such as biographies, or autobiographies and ethnographies. They recorded the experiences of growing up in the context of caste hierarchies, as child labourers, daughters responsible for the care of siblings, racial differences, etc. Some of these research problematises the role of schooling in enabling social mobility. These analyses are useful in building an understanding and locating the memories collected through the life narratives interviews for the current research. By bringing together this selection of memories the paper identifies and compares differential access to school, social network and experiences of marginalisation, accessing their chances of gaining social mobility