About
Research on education in India has been seeking adequate frameworks to explain the complex and contradictory effects of economic liberalization. Ensuing debates have centered around discussions of market expansion and the state’s retreat from its commitments to education. These debates, however, have not sufficiently addressed the co-existence of opportunities for social mobility alongside renewed intensifications of exploitation. In this context, the moral burden placed on education in addressing varied forms of inequalities and historical injustices has often rendered educational research prescriptive. This workshop invites us to assemble robust frameworks that can attend to the ways in which educational actors negotiate the contradictory conditions of post-market reform society. We conceive of ‘education’ broadly and as not limited to teaching and learning in spaces of schooling, higher education, or teacher education.
Supported by a grant from the Spencer Foundation, this three-day international workshop will be held from 9th to 11th January 2020. It will be hosted by Ahmedabad University. We have conceived of this as a small, intimate workshop which will bring together an interdisciplinary group of scholars from both India and abroad.
The workshop will be organised around two broad themes:
I. Devolution of Governance and Proliferation of (Infra)structures
This theme focuses on the restructuring of administrative infrastructures, managerial discourses, and forms of self-governance. Market reforms in India were accompanied by a reconfiguration of the state, resulting in a proliferation of governing agencies such as local elected bodies, public-private partnerships, non-governmental organizations, think tanks, and transnational advocacy groups. These agencies seek to regulate the state and create empowered citizens. Bringing together scholars who examine re-configurations of the state, forms of negotiation and regulation, and new modes of citizenship, this discussion will inform educational debates around governance.
II. Democratization of Aspiration
On the one hand, state and market agencies are engaged in the production of consumer desire while on the other hand, non-elite consumer desires unsettle entrenched inequalities while producing new forms of marginalization. Further, re-arranged values of land, diversification of employment opportunities, and intensification of precarity in the post-market reform period heighten desires for educated selves. Bringing together studies of aspirational mobilities in varied domains like work in the service industry, migration, and urbanization with new forms of aspirational politics, the discussion will enrich debates about educational aspirations.