We in the Centre for Study of Developing Societies, School Of Development Studies invite you to a Talk on

*Rethinking Schooling in Development Studies*
by Dr. Nandini Deo

Friday, 13th January 2023
Time: 4 pm
Venue: Bhabha Hall

Introduction to Talk:*Rethinking Schooling in Development Studies*

Schooling is one of the rare development interventions that has broad and deep support across the development sector. From studies pointing to the importance of schooling for improved health and sanitation<https://en.unesco.org/themes/education-health-and-well-being>, to those that link it with women's empowerment<https://www.jstor.org/stable/26609280> and greater control over fertility<https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4096045/>, to its inclusion as one of three measures in the Human Development Index<https://hdr.undp.org/data-center/human-development-index#/indicies/HDI>there is widespread agreement that more school is better. The task before states is to provide public schools for every child in their jurisdiction.
And the international community has included universal access to school as the fourth SDG <https://sdgs.un.org/goals/goal4>. But what if schooling is actually producing a materialistic monoculture that leaves peopledisconnected from their local environments (Black 2010), loyal to nation-states which seek to control them (Paglayan 2022), and unhappy with their lives (Deresiewicz 2014)? Some are asking if there are alternatives <https://www.shikshantar.org/articles/revolution-will-not-be-schooled-how-we-are-collectively-improvising-new-story-about>to school that could nurture sustainable ways of living or that could produce valuable misfits who will remake the world for us all (Richards 2021). What if we explore our assumptions about schooling, subject these assumptions to some critical inquiry, and consider somealternative experiments?

Speaker Profile:

Nandini Deo is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Lehigh University where she teaches courses on Social Activism, Religion & Politics and Indian Politics. She wrote *The Politics of Collective Advocacy in India* with Duncan McDuie Ra to understand how local, national,and international networks can strengthen and subvert social activism. Her second book, *Mobilizing Religion and Gender in India: The role of activism* (Routledge 2016) compares the rise and fall of women’s movements and Hindu nationalism and argues that activists’ strategies as they responded to changing political structures mattered more than ideology to the eventual effectiveness of the movement. Her edited volume *Postsecular Feminisms: Religion and Gender in Transnational Context* (Bloomsbury 2018) suggests that postsecularism must be a context specific approach to understanding the relationship between religion and gender. Deo is working with an international team on a project examining faith based organizations in the development sector and how they adapt to a Hindu nationalist government. She is finishing up a book about civil society and corporate partnerships in India. And she is beginning to think about a new project on unschooling as political utopia.