The perpetual [gendered] crisis in education: A genealogical analysis of the desired ideal girl in (post)colonial Bahrain

• In Event: No politics zone: Educational reform plans in the Arab Gulf States (AGS)

Proposal

In 2011, nation-wide protests in Bahrain left behind at least 122 deaths, 2700 reported physical injuries, and widespread population re-engineering policies granting and revoking citizenship–in the name of national security (Bassiouni et al., 2011; Hasso, 2016). Estimates reported thousands of teachers and students protesting for and against political reform, as well as riot police raids on school grounds- including fifteen girls’ intermediate and secondary schools (Bassiouni et al., 2011). Consequently, the 2011 protests paved way for the (re)formulation of technical assistance partnerships between Bahrain’s Ministry of Education, the British Council, US-based education experts, and United Nations agencies, designed to produce and introduce a reformed state-authored National Education (NE) curriculum to public and private K-12 schools in fall 2014. Viewed as a strategic step towards fostering “cultural pluralism” and “peace”, little is known about a) the competing agendas informing NE curricula; and b) the effects of NE curricula on girls’ lived realities- a population comprising roughly fifty percent of students in Bahrain’s K-12 schools. My paper takes this jarring over-sight as its point of departure.

For this presentation, I focus on five epochs for girls’ modern education unfolding in the context of Bahrain, the birthplace of modern schools in the Arab Gulf States (AGS) following the American missionary interventions in 1899. I apply a genealogical analysis to explore four archival collections: British colonial records, American missionary reports, AGS regional cultural magazines, and Bahrain’s local newspaper articles to trace the systematic discursive organization of the problem of gendered education disparities through discourses of crisis/success in education. Analytically, I argue that despite rapidly changing contextual processes, values, conditions and actors in Bahrain’s education and development arena, a consistent discourse of gendered crisis/success in education emerges in ways that “structure the field of other possible actions” (Foucault, 1982). Consequently, the dominant discourse of perpetual crisis/success in education opens up pathways for ahistorical and technical education reform interventions to deeply historical and complex sociopolitical problems of education in Bahrain. Such surface-level education reform interventions in turn discursively (re)produce a particular imagination of the ideal girl citizen-subject, a figure that is necessarily ahistorical and apolitical. Thus, my work supports existing anticolonial and transnational feminist critique of education reform in the Middle East as projects that discursively narrow the purpose of education towards: a) economic outcomes through neoliberal discourses, policies, and practices of “investing” in girls; and b) sociocultural outcomes through orientalist discourses, policies, and practices of “saving” girls (Abu Lughod, 2015; Adely, 2012; Skalli, 2015). Focusing on deeply divided contexts marked by sociopolitical tensions, my work has two aims. First, for education researchers, my study generates a theoretical understanding of K-12 schools as historically, socially, and politically contentious sites of nation-building. Secondly, for policy-makers and educators, my study traces and underscores counter-narrative possibilities to offer strategies, rooted in an ethos of social responsibility, in order to support young people -particularly girls- while navigating dynamic matrices of power and power-relations unfolding in their schools.

Author

• Sara J. Musaifer, University of Minnesota-Twin Cities