Abstract: Kiran Bhatty will be presenting her recent work, on the education experience of Muslims in Delhi, in the context of their citizenship claims in the school space. It is based on ethnographic research of Muslim families in two districts of the city – North-East Delhi (a minority concentration district), and South-East Delhi; interviews with school teachers across management types; and focus-group discussion with students. Through this research she shows the different ways in which Muslim families have responded to the spectre of ‘Islamophobia’ in schools, by adopting strategies that are differentiated across socio-economic class and location. The research also sheds light on the educational opportunities available to them, exhibiting simultaneously autonomy in school choice and ghettoizing as a ‘trajectory of marginalization.’ In so doing Kiran Bhatty unpacks the issue of subjectification of Muslims, through the trope of Islamophobia and demonstrates how such subjectification represents a distinct form of citizenship denial for Muslim. Her research highlights the fact that Muslim agency does not represent a monolith, exhibiting variation across class and location. A key argument of the study is that citizenship extends beyond civil and political rights to the creation of bonds of fellow feeling and belonging with other citizens; in that regard, the school space is critical, not just for citizenship education, but for fostering a ‘thicker’ notion of citizenship.

Speaker:

Kiran Bhatty has a Masters’ degree in Economics and an MPhil in Development Studies from the London School of Economics, UK and is currently pursuing a PhD at the EHESS, in Paris, France. Her research interests lie at the intersection of social policy and politics, encompassing issues of citizenship, social and economic rights, social justice and inequality, and state capacity and governance related especially to the education sector. She is a Senior Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Policy Research (CPR), where she has been researching institutional aspects of education provision including the frontline bureaucracy, regulatory mechanisms, systems of data management, and other aspects of education governance. For more https://www.csh-delhi.com/team_member/kiran-bhatty/

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