In Latin America, the NNATs (Niños, Niñas y Adolescentes trabajadores) movements bring together children and adolescents who work, often outside any legal framework, in the service of local and family economies embedded in a globalized market economy (Manier, 2003).

However, the existence of these movements is based on a total counter-intuition: the young people in these movements claim a singular status as "child workers", even though they are subjected to the worst forms of exploitation. They criticize national child protection systems and international abolitionist programs, which are seen as the guarantors of their growth, education, physical safety and psychological health, in application of the International Convention on the Rights of the Child. In the name of this "child-worker" identity, they constitute themselves as a political, moral and decolonial subject, proposing an alternative to contemporary childhood models that advocate a childhood removed from the world of work.

Most of these children are agricultural workers on export plantations (sugar cane, coffee, tobacco, orchards). They are also street workers (retail salesmen, shoeshine boys, car washers) or engage in domestic work (an economy over-represented among working girls). Some are drawn into exploitative forms of work in manufacturing, mining or child prostitution (Schlemmer, 1996).

These children and teenagers come from the most disadvantaged social backgrounds in their countries. Very early on, they are subjected to social and cultural inequalities related to their social and family origins. These inequalities determine the way they are socialized in their early years, and help to distinguish them from children from other social backgrounds (Lahire, 2019). Their socio-economic status and that of their families lead to systematic recourse to child labor. In the family sphere, their remuneration contributes to the domestic economy. In the field of education, their status as workers leads to forms of exclusion and disparate schooling, as the school is unable to adapt to their reality (Schlemmer, 2002). For parents, their children's work serves as an informal learning environment (Cavagnoud, 2012). This exclusion adds to that of the world of work, where they remain invisible (Jacquemin & Schlemmer, 2016) or excluded from the production of value (Nieuwenhuys, 1996).

These syndicalist movements campaign for recognition of the right to dignified, free and liberating work for all "child workers", and against all forms of exploitation. Mobilized children seek to play an active role in finding solutions to their own lives. They defend a "protagonism" of children (Liebel 2001; Morsolin, 2009) from which they demand to take part in the construction of new rights (legal, political, educational and social), favoring forms of childhood that reconcile family life, working life and schooling.

Accompanied by colaboradores (adults taking on the role of advisors), these children make their identity as workers visible at events and celebrations. They communicate via social networks and the media, using stories, audiovisual aids and interviews. They are part of a network of local and national players and partners (NGOs, institutions, parties, unions, schools, universities, socio-cultural associations). They develop local economic activities (silk-screen printing, small-scale livestock farming, plantations), fostering their financial autonomy, and creating social and political spaces that contribute to their socialization.

The NNATs movements are also part of a continental coordination: the MOLACNNATs (Movimiento Latinoamericano y del Caribe de Niñas, Niños y Adolescentes Trabajadores). Bringing together mandated children and adolescents, it has been acting as a representative body for NGOs, governments and international organizations (ILO, UNICEF) since 1988. Its delegates make demands on behalf of working girls, migrant children and environmental education, as part of the new social movements for gender equality, recognition of the rights of migrants and environmental protection.

In Venezuela, CORENATs (Coordinación Regional de Niños, Niñas y Adolescentes Trabajadores) is the working children's movement forming part of this continental coordination. Created in 2003, CORENATs has historically developed in several of the country's provincial states. CORENATs is building partnerships with public institutions for family programs, developing alliances with part of the trade union movement and pursuing discussions with the academic world on occupational health issues, as well as with social science academics.

The aim of this thesis project is to analyze the social, moral and political productions of working childhood, based on observation of the trajectories of young people's involvement in the Venezuelan CORENATs. How does one discover the existence of the movement when one is a child worker? What practices and ideas do you become a committed child? What forms do these commitments take? How can we make the category of "child worker" morally acceptable? What unique knowledge and skills do these activists acquire? What feelings of belonging does the movement help to build in children and teenagers? How do children and teenagers perceive and talk about their commitment? How do these commitments evolve within the movement, and are there any disengagements? How do these youth commitments continue into adulthood? And how can we describe the relationship with the movement's adult collaborators? What decision-making autonomy do children and teenagers have within the movement? What influence do work, family and school have on their involvement or non- involvement in the movement? Conversely, what impact does commitment have on working relationships and social, family and educational relationships?

The project will analyze these paths of commitment using sociologist Howard Becker's notion of the "deviant career" (Becker, 1963, 1985). This should make it possible to grasp the contours of "how does one become" morally deviant when one claims to be a child-worker. What transgression, what public designation of deviance and, ultimately, what change of identity in the eyes of others then takes place? In particular, these productions will be explored using the notion of "child culture", defined as "the body of knowledge, skills and behaviors that a child must acquire and master in order to be part of the peer group" (Delalande 2009; Danic 2011). This should make it possible to study how children and young people borrow from neighboring cultures to build their own. How is the hold of adult society on this child culture characterized? And, conversely, how do children disseminate this culture in adult society, of which they are both heirs and shapers? The research we undertake will also develop a gender-based analysis of these paths of commitment. How does gender play a part in polarizing commitments? What are the gaps between the rhetoric of gender equality and the practices of the movement in question?

Like the vast majority of working children, NNATs come from colonized populations and cultures. It will therefore be necessary to mobilize Manfred Liebel's studies on the prospects of a decolonization of childhood (Liebel, 2020) and Olga Nieuwenhuys' reflections on the need for postcolonial perspectives in childhood studies (Nieuwenhuys, 2013), in order to apprehend child workers' adherence to a subaltern history and condition. It will be possible to draw on the decolonial work of Capucine Boidin, as well as on the notions of "globocentrism" (Coronil, 2000) and "coloniality of power" (Quijano, 1992) to support the effects of colonization. Through the prism of an ethnography of the global (Burawoy, 2000), it will be necessary to study more broadly the influence of the moral, political and economic forces of the dominant models on the existence of NNATs, as well as their perception of belonging to a global world (Abélès, 2008). This research will conscientiously grasp the contours of a local-global articulation, while avoiding the bias of cultural relativism.

The collective experiences made possible by the NNAT movements help to turn these children into active subjects, producing "subjectivities", a notion defined as "a process of construction of the subject's relationship to the political and social order" (Foucault, 1966). This will enable us to analyze the social and cultural productions of working children through the prism of power relations, and thus place this project within the realm of politics. What ordinary and sometimes enduring behaviors do NNATs develop? What socialization mechanisms do these children generate as subjects? Ultimately, do they produce an endogenous "moral economy" (Scott, 1976; Fassin & Eideliman, 2012) that runs counter to prevailing moral values?

In particular, this work will mobilize the notion of "agency" (Garnier, 2015) to identify resistance among working children to the polymorphic imposition of a hegemonic childhood model. What subjective power do they acquire? What roles do they play as actors? The notions of "thin agency" and "thick agency" (Klocker, 2007) will enable us to grasp the contours of "agency" for children, and to show that it always stems from a capacity to act under constraint, or from dependence on adults. However, we must guard against the pitfalls of "ideological populism" (Olivier De Sardan, 1995), and avoid projecting positive values onto "child workers" and their movement, or asserting their total autonomy.

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