Global Aspirations and Local Obligations: An Ethnographic Exploration of Classed and Gendered Identities in Three Delhi Primary School Communities
Arnold, Benjamin Mark
Date: 16 May 2018
Thesis or dissertation
Publisher
University of Exeter
Degree Title
PhD Education
Abstract
Based on ethnographic research with Class V students (generally aged 9-11 years
old), their teachers and parents, this thesis explores how gendered and classed
identities are constructed in two MCD government elementary schools and one
Kindergarten-Class XII (K-XII) private school in West Delhi, India. I consider how local,
national ...
Based on ethnographic research with Class V students (generally aged 9-11 years
old), their teachers and parents, this thesis explores how gendered and classed
identities are constructed in two MCD government elementary schools and one
Kindergarten-Class XII (K-XII) private school in West Delhi, India. I consider how local,
national and global understandings of gender, class and education shape and are
shaped by these identities. Through this thesis, I highlight a conformity of aspirations,
among both boys and girls, in the two government and one private school, in which
education is viewed as a route achieve middle class lifestyles and careers. Across the
schools, students’ identities are shaped within a middle-class culture of schooling in
which students are expected to be on track to become individual, self-responsiblised,
entrepreneurial subjects who are committed to the development of the nation.
However, more importantly, schools encourage students to develop relational
identities in which they pursue individual aspirations within the broader context of an
emphasis on the prioritisation of family, the nation and religion. As a result, both a
(neoliberal) middle class culture of schooling and- more importantly- (Hindu) religious
nationalist notions of national identity play a central role in shaping the classed and
gendered identities of students in these primary schools. Within the framework of
Hindu cosmopolitanism, it is the Hindu, middle-class boy that emerges as the
normative school child, against which both girls and the ‘poor’/working class are placed
in deficit.
Doctoral Theses
Doctoral College
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