Peddling through Urban: Spatial Practices of Schoolchild Peddlers

Abstract

This article focuses on studying Thai children in the context of urban areas. In Thai academia, the fields of childhood studies and urban development have each proposed different approaches and perspectives for explaining Thai society. The work requires integrating analyses between two paradigms to gain an understanding of the situation of vulnerable marginalized dwellers in urban areas under the studying of practices in everyday life of child peddlers in restaurants and bars during Khonkaen urban nightlife. The dynamics of their social life represents the presence of invisible actors urban, triggers investigative studies of the norms and values in Thai children as ever kept by an adult caused by vertical relationships. Although school-child peddlers are a marginalized overlap of dwellers due to their age and social status vulnerabilities, the level of process and practice of peddling through various urban spaces reveals shifting spatial relationships between the children and the environments in which they are embedded. The network of relationships among students, parents, slums and urban areas have become increasingly interconnected in a horizontal manner. These school-age child peddlers create a social space that exists as an "otherness" in relation to both the central urban area of Khon Kaen and the marginalized railway-side slum communities. Similarly, this space reflects the children's marginal status as perceived through adult expectations, which significantly transcend normative conceptions of age.