Educational Exclusion and Violence: Dalit Women's Educational Experiences in Kerala, India

• In Event: Including the Excluded

Abstract

This feminist qualitative paper examines Dalit women’s educational experiences in the context of Kerala’s development initiatives. It focuses on intergenerational narratives from grandmothers, mothers and daughters. This paper seeks to illuminate how Dalit women navigate development in Kerala by specifically focusing on their educational narratives. By doing so, it aims to explicate the actions of these women as social agents working within institutional and societal structures in postcolonial Kerala. It uses postcolonial feminist theory as it applies to the Kerala context along with intersectionality as appropriate conceptual frameworks in understanding how gender, class, caste and religion shape Dalit women’s education across different generations.

Author

• Sera Mathew, West Virginia University