Segregated Schooling in Spatially Interspersed Cities: Private Schooling and Ascriptive Hierachies in a Global-South Metropolis

• In Event: Sociology of Education Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 19. Local, State, and Regional Landscapes and Educational Experiences

Abstract

This paper examines how ascriptive hierarchies like caste persist and are reproduced in a spatially interspersed city like Chennai, one of India's largest metropolises, through school segregation rather than clearly bounded “caste localities”. Drawing on nine months of participant observation and 21 interviews with school administrators and teachers across 3 private schools in a spatially interspersed neighbourhood, I argue that, in contexts where caste-based residential segregation is ambiguous and hard to map, caste is recoded and reproduced through institutional segregation, particularly in schools. I extend global-south and American-centric segregation debates by showing that school segregation does not simply reflect residential segregation but actively augments it by providing robust conditions that shape unequal interactions among its stakeholders, with increasing social distance despite spatial proximity. The paper first outlines the educational “marketscape” of Chennai, showing how schools are marketised and differentiated through multiple “boards,” an administrative and colloquial term for curricular board affiliation. It then offers a detailed ethnographic analysis to demonstrate that the schools in my study are clearly segregated along caste lines, despite being located in the same area and governed by the same administrative bodies. I highlight two core mechanisms that produce and legitimise this segregation: the deployment of “fuzzy boundaries” that use curricular board affiliation, income criteria and other seemingly neutral markers to obfuscate and justify segregation; and the ways India's affirmative action policies and the abolition of common entrance tests have enabled institutional flight and school choice strategies that consolidate privileged-caste advantage. Together, the paper shows how school identity comes to stand in for caste identity in Chennai’s urban education market, reframing segregation in global-south cities as an institutional, not merely residential, process

Author

• Vishal Vasanthakumar, University of Cambridge