Respectability, Precarity, and Contested Knowledges: Complicating the Truths About Girls' Schooling

• In Event: 52.037 - Islam, Gender, and Education: (De)Constructing Tradition and Modernity in the United Arab Emirates, Pakistan, and India

Abstract

Objectives
This article complicates the celebratory uptake of girls’ education as a panacea for societal problems within the development regime, where schooling is often assumed to engender a modern subjectivity. It explore assumptions around modernity and girl citizenship embedded in this discourse and problematizes them by drawing on focus group conversations conducted with girls, parents, and teachers in Pakistan.

Theoretical Framework
The paper draws on poststructuralist theorizations of education as a form of governmentality. I examining the data to explore the modes of self-governance that education inaugurates as well as the critiques put forth by the participants.

Methods & Data
I collected data in a Shi’i Muslim community within in Pakistan. Overall, I conducted a total of 12 focus group conversations – four of these groups were with teachers, three with parents, and five with girls between the ages of 13 and 21. Each focus group had a minimum of three and a maximum of five participants. I used open-ended questions that included: What does education (ta’alim) mean to you? What is the purpose of education? Where does education take place? What limitations (if any) does formal schooling have? What changes would you want to see in your own schooling? I undertook thematic coding in order to highlight recurring themes and patterns in the participants’ narratives. In the paper, I present these themes to highlight participants’ experiences with formal schooling and the possibilities that schooling afforded them as well as its limitations

Results
My study shows that not only do individuals consume schooling differently depending on their social class, but also that those who partake in the endeavor may find it falling short. Participants in my study critiqued schooling for failing to deliver on its promise for waged-work and called for more hunar-based (skills) training. Moreover, since my participants belonged to a minority religious community in Pakistan, they saw official ‘school knowledges’ as threatening their identity and called for greater attention to (Shi’i) religious education. The paper suggests that girls and their families who are situated on the margins of society due to their social class and religious interpretation may experience schooling in problematic ways.

Significance
Education is expected to propel girls in the global South onto paths of success and prosperity, away from traditions and towards an enlightened modern identity. This system of reasoning articulates girls as agents who can take personal responsibility for their development, secure rights, and economic empowerment, and schooling appears as the primary pathway towards this progress and emancipation. However, when we actually consider the realities of girls (as glimpsed in the narratives of the participants) we see that schooling is at times experienced in problematic ways. It makes available some subject positions, while erasing others. These findings contest dominant assumptions about modernity and schooling by inflecting them with social class and religion.

Author

• Shenila Khoja-Moolji, University of Pennsylvania