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Quality education is increasingly considered essential for human development. However, the mainstream approach to quality as a neutral technology often ignores deeply embedded issues of power relations. This article interrogates the taken-for-granted idea of ‘quality education’ by exploring the ways in which students navigate the assumption of quality education in two mother-tongue schools in Nepal. Drawing on the concept of language ideology, this article shows that the perceived social prestige associated with a language choice is closely intertwined with the discourse of quality education in Nepal. In this context, the students secure ‘imageries of competence’ by repeatedly drawing attention to more acceptable indicators of ‘quality’ such as high examination scores, English proficiency and continuation of higher studies. This article foregrounds the power relations embedded in the perception of quality education and intends to be of wider analytical relevance to other socially heterogeneous contexts beyond Nepal.

The recent socio-political changes in Nepal have brought assimilationist notions of Nepali nationalism under a tight scrutiny and drawn attention to more plural, inclusive, and diverse notions of Nepaliness. However, both assimilationist and pluralist visions continue to remain normative in their approach, and often posit ethnic and national identity in opposition to each other. Drawing on the everyday practices in the two schools, this book illustrates that social actors in minority language education did not necessarily select between minority identity and national identity, but instead made simultaneous claims to more than one social identity by discursively positioning 'ethnic identity' as 'national identity'. It builds on the notion of 'simultaneity' to illustrate that it is through the 'unresolved co-presences' of apparently contradictory ways that people maintain their multi-layered identities. By arguing for an analytical necessity to adopt relational approach, it aims to complicate the neat compartmentalisation of identities.

In 1990, the Constitution of Nepal declared Nepal a multi-ethnic (bahujatiya) country. This newly transformed state promised better inclusion of marginalised groups through special provisions. How has this been operationalised, and what does this mean in practice for the members of the groups concerned? Drawing on fieldwork in the Nepal Foundation for Development of Indigenous Nationalities (NFDIN), this paper argues that the Nepali state’s moral and political obligation to address long-standing concerns about group-based inequalities has opened up intriguing new spaces to perform and redefine state–society relations. Within these new spaces, categories of difference are constantly invoked and experienced, where both the state and citizens come to co-constitute each other in a variety of new ways.

From an anthropological perspective, (educational) ethnography is much more than just a method in terms of a set of techniques but a way of taking a place in and grasping the world that ethnographers aim to represent and comprehend. With an imperative of “being there,” the ethnographer travels to specific locations to establish some form of physical presence in the field site. The idea of “location,” therefore, is central to educational ethnography in several ways. Research on education among different categories of people in Nepal, and a vast body of ethnographic literature on education around the world, demonstrates the centrality of “location” in anthropological knowledge production. This article discusses “location” as a conceptual category in order to explore the different analytical levels at which it operates in anthropological knowledge production on education. It does so in three different ways. First, ethnographers’ locations in the field—their biographical trajectories, academic backgrounds, and social positions—lay the ground for the ways in which ethnographers ‘see’ education in the field. Second, the historical context and sociopolitical developments of specific geographic locations, in this case Nepal, draw attention to ways in which existing societal concerns foster particular research interests on education and consequently shape knowledge about a given geographical location. Third, conducting ethnographic fieldwork in a variety of spatial sites within and beyond institutions of schooling allows ethnographers to explore the multiple and often conflicting meanings of education. This awareness on the multiplicity of ethnographic locations in educational ethnography promises to deepen our understanding of education, broadly defined, through a rigorous and highly contextualized inquiry that highlights multiple and contested voices and presents subjective modes of perceiving reality.

This thesis explores the issue of ethno-linguistic identity through an examination of everyday practices in two mother-tongue schools in Nepal. While language and ethnicity have remained highly politicised subject in Nepal, the everyday cultural politics of language use inside minority language school has received very limited academic attention. In this thesis, I focus on the ways in which different people understand, experience, and interpret mother-tongue education in their everyday life. Drawing on Bourdieu's notion of social field, I argue that mother-tongue instruction not only concerns the introduction of minority languages in education, but also constitutes an 'arena of struggle', where the idea of an 'educated person' is (re)imagined, and the social positions of ethno-linguistic groups are negotiated. To explain this further, I show that minority language education function as a subfield within the larger social field of national education. On the one hand, everyday language practices in the schools display inward-looking characteristics through the everyday use of mother tongue and the construction of unified ethnic identity within the subfield of minority language education. On the other hand, there were outward-looking dynamics of actively engaging with the national education system. The salience of these processes is the simultaneous membership to multiple groups, claims over public spaces and in the spaces of nationalism, hitherto associated with Nepali. Using the idea of 'simultaneity', I show that social actors in minority language education might not necessarily select between subfield and social field, but instead thrive in their tense intersection. In this process, ethno-linguistic groups are able to construct their own subjectivities by negotiating what it means to be educated in a minority language. This emerging narrative of minority language education may help us to understand the issues of language and ethnicity in a more open-ended way and appreciate the multiple scales in which identities are expressed.

Source: ICHE Conference Archive - https://mdi-de.baw.de/icheArchive