Unstitching Third World Girls and Education

• In Event: Roundtable Session (Tuesday VI)
  In Refereed Round-Table Session: Beyond schooling: reimagining education, development and empowerment for third world girls

Proposal

Over the past 20 years, the significance of ‘education as a pathway to empowerment’ for the girl child has garnered increased visibility and noreitey. Powever development actors boast that when you invest in a third world girl, you inherently invest in changing her nation. While this claim is compelling it makes invisible the processes of power governing education, it masks the instrumentalist nature of positioning third world girls as tools of development, and it further homogenizes third world girls as single-story subjects whose complex experiences and struggles can all be resolved with education. I utilize ethnographic methods to examine this complex relationship between third world girls and education. I engage in interviews, participant observations and focus groups to conduct a case study on school in Northeaster India. Many countries in the global south have adopted this rhetoric and proclaim that by investing in third world girls in their countries they have seen a myriad of benefits: slowed population growth, increased GDP, improved health outcomes, slowed child marriage, and a host of other economic improvements. India is one of these such countries and it boasts that it’s investments in girls has drastically improved it’s global economic reach. As a result of this so-called success, girl’s education initiatives have increased dramatically within the last decade from both private-sector, NGO’s and government initiatives. As one of the world’s largest democracies and largest global economies, India is an important place to study this phenomenon. Northeastern India is an equally important place to study this phenomenon in India because it is a part of India that has often been underrepresented in narratives regarding girl's education. The following questions are central to my research and have been underexplored in narratives about girls education in India: (1)how exactly does education empower third world girls? (2) how is education defined and experienced by girls in the third world? (3) what do third world girls in the world's largest democracy have to say about the education efforts that are supposed to empower them? I seek to gain insights into how girls conceptualize, negotiate and make meaning of their own experiences with education. This work is committed to the praxis of “hearing girls” voices; a praxis Khoja-Moolji suggests is critical to destabilizing inherent power imbalances embedded in relationships between the Global North and Global South. More specifically this research examines how the intersections of colonialism, the geopolitics of development, and the expansion of capitalism interact to shape contemporary efforts guiding the movement to educate third world girls.

Author

• Derrika Hunt, University of California, Berkeley