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Educating Pakistan’s daughters: girls’ citizenship education and the reproduction of cultural violence in Pakistan

Mon, April 15, 8:00 to 9:30am, Hyatt Regency, Floor: Bay (Level 1), Bayview B

Proposal

This paper is drawn from a case study exploring the link between girls’ citizenship education and identity-based violence in Pakistan. The data for the case study was collected over a three-month period in a model secondary school in Islamabad, Pakistan which caters to middle-class urban girl students. Data was collected using ethnographic methods including participant observation, 15 qualitative interviews with teachers, administrators, and support staff, a participatory workshop with 12 teachers, focus groups with 33 students and classroom observation of social studies classes. The focus of this paper is on how school practice – the day-to-day activities that happen in and out of the classroom – reproduce a gendered and classed notion of citizenship. Drawing upon Bulter’s notions of gender performativity (Butler, 1988) and Galtung’s (1969; 1990) violence triangle, I used critical discourse analysis to unpack the implications for violence against women.
The findings of this study suggest that for the urban middle-class girls of the case study school, citizenship is entwined with the historical constructions of nationalist and religious notions of womanhood. Citizenship education teaches girls that their duty to the state is located in the private sphere of the home, as mothers and wives, while excluding them from the rights associated with citizenship that are located in the male dominated public sphere. This was evidenced through the teachers’ understandings of citizenship, which closely reflected the historical and religious ideals of Pakistani women including importance placed on obedience, charity, cleanliness/neatness, and an understanding of Pakistan as one with Islam. These ideals were then passed on to students through various aspects of school practice including the types of activities available, the visual messages displayed throughout the school, classroom practices, and rewarding of students who performed gender in a way that most aligns with the middle class notions of womanhood.
I then argue that the teachers’ and students’ understandings of the role of women to counter violence is rooted in the notions of middle class women’s roles as mothers and supporters of men. Most of the teachers and students indicated that they had limited agency to affect change outside of an ability to influence their children and husbands. I argue that citizenship education in this school serves as a form of cultural violence as it discourages girls from affecting change upon the social structures which disempower them. I further link cultural violence (Galtung, 1990) to the legitimisation of structural violence against women, and to direct violence in the most extreme cases.
The research from which this paper derives furthers the knowledge about the links between education and violence and gender by illuminating the links between school practice, gender performance, and the reproduction of cultural violence.

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