Khushboo Jain
Khushboo Jain has worked extensively towards securing rights of children in contact with railways in India including through a petition in the Delhi High Court. She is the Founding member of the All India Working Group for Rights of Children (AIWGRC), an alliance founded in June 2014 with an objective to empower children through facilitating child participation in legal reforms. Her PhD research, Home-making on the Streets of Delhi, offers a critique of the narratives of homelessness through ethnographically rich research on the practices of home-making on the streets.
Project: Home-making on the Streets of Delhi‘
‘Home-making on the Streets of Delhi’ is a deep ethnographic study of the everyday home-making practices of the street dwellers in the capital city of Delhi, India. Home-making on the streets is infused by the moral sentiment of an international narrative of home and homelessness and vexed political motivations of clean urban streets. And between these extremes lie the everyday negotiation of practices of home-making on urban streets. By exploring street dwelling in three different kinds of space – of worship, market and a railway station, this dissertation examines how different street spaces become home for its inhabitants, how the material and social space aid in the processes of home-making, and how street dwellers add to the character and the economy of these spaces. It further evaluates how the street as a space of home-making is understood in policies and interventions for street-dwellers as a way to deepen the critique of the narratives of homelessness.