This dissertation is a genealogical work on violence. It is grounded in analysis of the role that structural violence and the construction of social relationships based on punishment have played in the historical formation of a new population and social category called "street children." I analyze "sokak çocuklari" ("street children") from within the perspective of the history of the making of Turkey, which has produced social, geographical and psychic displacement. I investigate some of the basic categories of modernity, such as nation-state, city, childhood and youth calling attention to the social contradictions produced through economic, race and gender violence. By exploring how people express different ways of knowing, being and acting in the world, this ethnography counters the criminalization of "street children" with rich, unanticipated ethnographic data and unexpected new knowledge.

At the root of this dissertation's conceptual inquiry lies the question of how the hyper visibility of children who stay on the street and children who work on the street renders invisible many forms of violence against them that have created the social category "street children" in the first place. The largest question that moves this dissertation is: What kind of knowledge does the social population "street children" produce about history? How is it that modern society's most vulnerable populations—poor, migrant children who work on the streets and poor migrant youth and children who stay on the streets—are those populations who are most feared, whose labor power is most exploited and who cause intense and contradictory public sentiments like disgust, social phobia, pity? What is it about their social condition of vulnerability and state of colonization as a population of children that creates assumptions about both their criminality and violence? Further what is it about the violence visible on their bodies through burn marks, scars, other wounds--that in turn make them most prone to state and social violence? This dissertation explores these questions and fosters the development of new articulations about young people's cultures of subjectivity whose perceptions of their lives are described.