Changing childhoods, places and work: the everyday politics of learning-by-doing in the urban weaving economy in Ethiopia

The academic literature on children‘s work is increasingly moving towards a position in which children‘s involvement in paid work is appreciated as both potentially harmful and emancipatory (see for e.g., Bourdillon et al 2010, Aufseeser et al 2018). Such a nuanced position, however, stands in stark contrast with the policy reality in Ethiopia and to a lesser extent globally. In this thesis, I zoom in on the case of working children in the urban weaving economy drawing from 12 months of ethnographic fieldwork and school survey in Addis Ababa.