SPOKE: From naming to claiming: Subaltern struggles for the Right to Education

SPOKE LEADER:
Nisha Thapliyal

RESEARCH QUESTION:

How does Education Rights advocacy by social movements and other forms of collective mobilization support education for social justice, sustainable development, and radical democracy?

 

PROJECT SUMMARY:
Thapliyal’s spoke of research examines competing discourses of education rights in India and Brazil using feminist, critical, and post-colonial conceptualizations of the relationship between social movements for education and the state in deeply stratified, capitalist societies (Mohanty 1984; Alvarez, Dagnino & Escobar 1990). In this conceptual framework, education as well as rights-based approaches to development, is understood to be contested and contradictory terrain wherein exists the potential to reproduce or challenge and transform extant social hierarchies. Research methodologies employed in this project are shaped by feminist and critical scholarship about policy analysis and social movement research; specifically methodologies shaped by critical ethnography and participatory action research (Kincheloe & McLaren, 1994).