Decolonizing life skills education for girls in Brahmanical India: a Dalitbahujan perspective

Aditi Arur; Joan DeJaeghere

doi:10.1080/09540253.2019.1594707

Decolonizing life skills education for girls in Brahmanical India: a Dalitbahujan perspective

Aditi Arur, Joan DeJaeghere

Organizational Leadership, Policy and Development

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9 Scopus citations

Abstract

Life skills have become the foci of many girls’ education initiatives because they are assumed to empower girls to negotiate oppressive gender norms constraining their lives. Often these programmes give a singular attention to gender norms, despite other interlocking oppressive structures and norms. Although postcolonial feminist perspectives in education have often stressed on intersectional analyses, little attention has been given to caste in such scholarship in India. In this paper, we draw on data from a three-year qualitative study of a girls’ life skills programme in Rajasthan, India, employing a postcolonial feminist framework. We engage with Dalitbahujan feminist perspectives in education (Paik, S. 2014. Dalit Women's Education in Modern India: Double Discrimination. London: Routledge.) to decolonize our frameworks and illustrate how the life skills programme produced contradictory outcomes to address gender oppression, such as ensuring girls' bodily integrity, while re-inscribing caste norms. This intersectional analysis of caste, gender, and modernity expands on a postcolonial feminist critique of life skills.

Original language	English (US)
Pages (from-to)	490-507
Number of pages	18
Journal	Gender and Education
Volume	31
Issue number	4
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1080/09540253.2019.1594707
State	Published - May 19 2019

Bibliographical note

Funding Information:
The research study discussed in this paper was funded by the U.S. Department of Labor. We thank our colleagues from JPAL South Asia and American University, as well as the research assistants and translators in the conduct of this research. We also thank the participants in this study, the young girls and women as well as the local, national, and international staff from the nongovernmental organization for their cooperation during the conduct of this research.

Funding Information:
The research study discussed in this paper was funded by the U.S. Department of Labor.

Keywords

India
Postcolonial theory
caste, girls' education
intersectionality

UN SDGs

This output contributes to the following UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)

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Decolonizing life skills education for girls in Brahmanical India: a Dalitbahujan perspective

Abstract

Bibliographical note

Keywords

UN SDGs

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