Enumeration as Pedagogic Process: Gendered Encounters with Identity Documents in Delhi’s Urban Poor Spaces

Abstract

This paper argues that the various encounters of female slum residents residing in Delhi’s margins with identification documents shape certain instrumental and symbolic forms of knowledge about the city. Urban poor women’s encounters with identity documents produce ‘piecemeal pedagogies’ in which these women try to educate themselves and 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. The arguments about the pedagogic process are made through an assessment of various forms of literacy complicated by unequal social relations. This paper frames the pedagogies of ID documents in the lives of the city’s urban poor over the last two decades, which have been marked by shifting technologies of enumeration.