About the talk: Drawing on initial findings from a TESF-IIHS funded project on “Education, Margins and City: Examining the linkages through an Ethnographic Exploration” in a Jhuggi-Jhopri cluster in Delhi, this talk examines the mechanisms that determine not only how urban is ordered, but how this order making function of the state is realized. We argue that the educational discourse is a potential site to capture the rationalities and the practices through which the margins that are rife with illegalities and informalities are disciplined and ordered in the ways of the urban. On one hand, the lives of children living in the informal settlements take the shape of illegality for the teachers and the bureaucracy that runs the education institutions, and on the other hand the parents and the children find school as a point that legitimizes their right to the city. While constitutional liberal forms of citizenship are one among many different claims that the poor make on the state, nature of education is such that it gets entangled in managing the exclusionary pressures shaping the city. Thus, with education being at the fulcrum in which the disciplinary and biopolitical characteristics of the state meet, an urban order emerges that is built through the categories of beauty, hygiene, efficiency, discipline and class assessments.

About Speakers:

Jyoti Dalal, is an Associate Professor at the Institute of Home Economics, University of Delhi since 2004. She is also General Secretary of the Comparative Education Society of India (CESI), an affiliate to the World Congress of Comparative Education Societies (WCCES).  She was at Institute of Economic Growth as a doctoral fellow from 2010-12. With academic publication, she also writes in The Indian Express, The Telegraph, Wire and other forums, touching upon the concerns of education and society. She has been involved with research projects funded by University of Delhi, ICSSR and IIHS, Bangalore.

Chetan Anand is a research scholar at Tata Institution of Social Sciences, Mumbai. His research interests are on the intersections of Urbanism, Childhood and Education. His other research interests include violence, philosophy of language, biopolitics, power and modernity. He is currently doing an ethnographic study of a slum in Delhi, exploring questions of state, marginality, and education.

This is the hundred and forty-nine (149) in a series of Urban Workshops planned by the Centre de Sciences Humaines (CSH), New Delhi and Centre for Policy Research (CPR). These workshops seek to provoke public discussion on issues relating to the development of the city and try to address all its facets including its administration, culture, economy, society and politics. For further information, please contact: Aprajita Sarcar of CSH at aprajita.sarcar@csh-delhi.com, Mukta Naik at mukta@cprindia.org or Marie-Hélène Zerah at marie-helene.zerah@ird.fr