[CSH-CPR Urban Workshop #179] Channelling Compassion Towards Change: Elite Volunteerism, Corporate Philanthropy and Education Reform in Urban India (V. Subramanian)
The Centre de Sciences Humaines (CSH) & Centre for Policy Research (CPR)
are pleased to invite you to an Urban Workshop N°179
by
Vidya Subramanian
(Associate Professor, Jindal School of Government & Public Policy)
on
Channeling Compassion Towards Change:
Elite Volunteerism, Corporate Philanthropy and Education Reform in Urban India
on
Tuesday, 28 January 2025, at 3:45 pm IST onwards
Register to attend on Zoom
Register to attend in person
About the talk: This talk explores how corporate philanthropy is steering non-governmental organisations (NGO) engaged in school education reforms within the larger ambit of Public Private Partnerships (PPP) and governance in post-liberalisation India. It examines these complex dynamics through the trajectories of young elite professionals who volunteered with the corporate-supported transnational education intervention – the Teach for India (TFI) programme across Mumbai and Delhi. The TFI intervention operates as a nodal site for these elite professionals with engineering, commerce, and management educational backgrounds to not just serve underprivileged children through ‘acts of compassion’ but also channel their experiences to understand the education system and reinvigorate it through corporate management values of enterprise and performance. An examination of the pathways of these individuals foreground the nascent terrain of technocratic expertise being shaped through an interlinked collective of corporate NGOs that have become significant over the past decade in directing policy measures toward improving public education.
Speaker:
Dr. Vidya Subramanian has an interdisciplinary academic background in sociology, education studies, and development studies. Her research focuses on the Public public-private partnerships in education, entrepreneurship, and governance in post-liberalization India. She received her PhD and MPhil from the Zakir Husain Centre for Educational Studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi, during which she was a doctoral fellow at the Transnational Research Group (TRG) of the Max Weber Foundation-German Humanities Institutes Abroad. Before joining the Jindal School of Government and Public Policy she taught at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai, and was a consultant to the Tata Trusts. Dr. Subramanian’s research has been published in the Economic & Political Weekly, Contemporary Education
This is the one hundred and seventy-ninth (179) 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 the city’s development issues and address all its facets including its administration, culture, economy, society, and politics. For further information, please contact: Rama Devi of CSH at rama.devi@csh-delhi.com, Mukta Naik at mukta@cprindia.org, or Marie-Hélène Zerah at marie-helene.zerah@ird.fr