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There appears to be a globally unifying discourse that suggests Muslim communities are not supportive of girls' education12. This paper aims to destabilize such a discourse by inserting the narratives of Muslim parents pursuing girls' education in Assam's Nagaon district. By paying attention to the concepts of bhal suwali (good girlhood) and bhal ghor (good family) articulated by parents in my study, this paper connects the performances of certain types of gender practices with the pursuit of class aspirations. It shows that good girlhood works as symbolic capital that helps Muslim parents to culturally authorize their daughters as legitimate actors in the field of education, while legitimizing themselves as good family. This paper draws attention to three practices of respectable femininity through which good girlhoods are enacted in the field of education, namely: negotiating poverty respectably, prioritizing gendered discipline, and merging career aspirations with marital prospects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2018, Nuh, barely 75 km from India's parliament, was ranked by the Government as the country's most 'backward' district. It is a region fraught with many challenges including endemic poverty and simmering communal tensions, which among other factors have contributed to historically limiting women from pursuing higher education or building career aspirations. While the state has attempted to correct this by building new colleges, this paper explores how women experience and navigate these college spaces. Using a critical feminist lens, it seeks to understand the social and cultural possibilities that college life and higher education have in their lives. Findings suggest that while there are major restrictions on social agency within their everyday life, college emerges as a liminal space that provides an 'escape'. The college space for these women offers possible pathways of imagination, dialogue, solidarity and support, all forming the complex matrix of their future possibilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is based on a larger doctoral study about Critical Sexuality Education with children in Delhi, India. It puts forth alternate research and pedagogic interventions, inspired by the 'real' world, to engage children on ideas about sexuality beyond the biological. After presenting a brief overview of political debates and state programmes about sex/uality education in recent years in India, I go on to detail two examples of Participatory Research with girls at a Shelter Home for street children. These involve spatial mapping of their neighbourhood and interviewing a woman E-rickshaw driver. The children-researchers collaborated with the researcher-facilitator to pose questions about gender, violence, equity, access, social justice and so on, vis-à-vis their own lived experiences and social realities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper attempts to explore the connections between expanding female education and the participation of women in paid employment in Japan, China and India, three of Asia's largest economies. Analysis based on existing data and literature shows that despite the large expansion in educational access in these countries in the last half century, women have lacked egalitarian labour market opportunities. A combination of social discouragement and individual choice largely explains the withdrawal, non-participation or intermittent female presence in the labour force, notwithstanding increased educational access. In taking stock of these issues and debates across these countries, it is argued that the parallel experiences of women in these countries can be traced back to persistent gender norms which, amongst other things, imply the centrality of marriage and non-market unpaid labour for women. The paper argues that there is a need for gender-sensitive public policy in order for increased education to translate to labour market gains for women, leading to sustainable development outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

India presents a heterogeneous socio-economic ethos, rooted within structures of patriarchy and caste, rendering any transformation of traditional gender roles, increasingly challenging. Gender socialisation begins in childhood and is assimilated through schools. Students imbibe gender concepts through textbooks and classroom experiences, which either reinforce their social perceptions or influence them to critique inequalities and bias. Adopting a multi-pronged approach through feminist critical discourse analysis (FCDA) and content analysis, this research evaluates the images used in Indian school social science textbooks, for constructs of gender representation, structures, and stereotyping. The research reveals that gender structures depicted in textbooks foster patriarchy and gender bias. There is minimal effort to depict feminist activism and little scope to foster gender reflexivity and social debate, which only sustains stereotypical perceptions of gender roles within Indian society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]