My study aimed to explore the secondary school choice of the internally migrant Ismailisi from Gilgit-Baltistan (GB) in Karachi, Pakistanii. I became interested in the topic for several reasons. Firstly, there was a scarcity of research on the topic. An initial review of the literature indicated that though the education of migratory groups had been discussed in relation to refugee or diaspora education, there was scope to examine school choice in internally migrant populations. Secondly, the school choice process in the developing world had been paid inadequate attention (Srivastava, 2005, p. 70). Thirdly, my previous field studies in GB provided me with much food for thought.

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This thesis explores the degree of independent action possible by national governments in deciding their education policies – in other words, what may be termed their sphere of authority (SoA) – in the context of globalisation; whereby Pakistan, perhaps more than many nation states, is subject to a variety of geopolitical and economic pressures. This issue is explored through a study of the recent education policy review process in Pakistan that resulted in a White Paper: ‘Education in Pakistan’ in 2007. In exploring the SoA of the government of Pakistan in deciding its education policy priorities, key areas of enquiry include the tensions between national and global interests and their attempted discursive management by the government of Pakistan. The research uses Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) as its main methodological resource and looks at two kinds of textual data: interviews with key policy actors and selected policy texts. The methodology of CDA draws attention to the fact that texts are embedded within linguistic, discursive and structural contexts, and that these contexts provide resources that are mobilized by different actors. The textual data resources were analysed to see how language shapes the construction of the White Paper; what discourses are being drawn upon and contested in the articulation of the White Paper and thus what broad power structures shape the White Paper and illustrate the SoA of the government of Pakistan. The findings suggest that the policy review process as illustrated by the White Paper reveals various tensions caused by differences between global and national education policy interests. These tensions are visible in the style and genre of policy; the pursuit of global policy prescriptions; trends to privatization of provision; and disputes over the issue of language and about the ideological principles that should inform educational provision. The research suggests that inclusive and ‘soft’ governance discourse along with a process of consultation were used by the government in an attempt to manage these tensions. The expertise with which the government designed the consultation process and deployed discursive resources sought to establish and maintain its SoA.

This study explores the normative frameworks through which selected parents, students, teachers, and education activists in three villages in rural Pakistan understand and articulate the value of girls' schooling. It argues that within the dominant analytical paradigms of human capital theory and neoliberalism, researchers and policymakers have tended to conceptualise 'demand' for schooling in terms that are narrowly focused upon measuring and boosting enrolment, and thus have failed to capture whether and how shifting enrolments correspond to shifting norms and to the broader imaginative regimes through which differently located actors experience and produce the gendered value of schooling. Typical analyses of 'demand' for girls' schooling have mostly focused upon what factors of schooling provision are most likely to increase parents' willingness to send their daughters to school, and thus inadvertently conflate 'demand' with 'supply' and reveal very little about whether or how such factors influence normative evaluations of girls' schooling by parents, children, teachers, and others across various contexts where enrolment is on the rise. This oversight hinders efforts at comparison that are critical for planning and interpreting transnational initiatives for achieving gender equality in and through schooling. To improve upon this trend, this study illustrates a) the normative evaluations that underpin selected instances of 'demand' for girls' schooling in three villages in rural Pakistan, and b) how these normative evaluations have changed over time and in relation to particular interventions. Using data from seventeen weeks of fieldwork spanning two villages in the southern Punjab and one in Gilgit-Baltistan, the study explores perspectives about the value of girls' schooling in relation to the key themes of marriage, employment, and purdah. By bringing this data into comparison with mainstream discouses about 'demand,' the study highlights the limitations of those discourses and charts a path for further comparative inquiry. Findings illustrate how normative perspectives about girls' schooling are differentially contested and transformed over time even as enrolment trends converge across contexts, and suggest that researchers and practitioners concerned with promoting gender equality in and through schooling should lend greater attention to the social interactions through which 'norm-making' occurs. This sort of attention to 'norm-making' can reveal new opportunities for intervention, but also, and perhaps more importantly, it inspires humility by demonstrating that all normative evaluations of schooling - whether emerging from education 'experts' or from farmers in rural villages - reflect socially and historically situated notions of personhood, none of which is more 'natural' than any other.