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Education and Dis/Empowerment in Gujarat, India
Wed, April 17, 8:00 to 9:30am, Hyatt Regency, Floor: Atrium (Level 2), Garden Room AProposal
The first perspective draws from over 15 years of engagement in India and research on gender, education and development. This research takes a multi-leveled approach to examine how international discourses on gender and education influence the national, state, institutional, and individual levels and in particular, understandings of and meanings ascribed to empowerment. To do so, I assume a socio-cultural approach to policy analysis (Sutton and Levinson, 2001) where policy is a constantly negotiated, challenged, and reorganized process in daily social life. I focus on how policy is appropriated; how it is applied, interpreted, negotiated, and/or contested by a multiplicity of actors. This holistic approach requires not only analysis of the discourses, ideologies, and theories implicitly and explicitly found within the policy itself, but also analysis of the process of the practice of policy, and in particular the appropriation of policy as it is formed and actualized on the ground.
I engage in this process by identifying and tracing how transnational empowerment discourses impact the nature of the educational opportunities offered to marginalized girls in Gujarat. In exploring the lived educational experiences of Gujarati girls who receive formal education, I also examine the implications of these educational opportunities for broader gender-oriented social change. This research helps to illuminate the manifestation of the interconnected processes of empowerment and disempowerment in schools in India through student experiences. In this way, this longitudinal ethnographic research combines discourse analysis with ethnographic research to reveal how adolescent aged girls in Gujarat are positioned as particular subjects, and how they context, negotiate, and reorganize these subjectivities.