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.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:754279 |
| Date | January 2018 |
| Creators | Arnold, Benjamin Mark |
| Contributors | Allan, Alexandra ; Martin, Fran |
| Publisher | University of Exeter |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Source | http://hdl.handle.net/10871/34113 |
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