Publications & Resources
Our faculty, students and researchers work together everyday to contribute to a better world by grappling with urgent problems we are facing in India. We conduct rigorous work to produce high quality learning resources and publications to contribute to public discourse and social change. Here, we feature a sample from our work for everyone to access. You can explore featured resources, policies, and the latest publications from the University.
To explore all the work of our University, please visit our publications repository.
Article
The Social Contract and India’s Right to Education
in International Institute of Social Studies, The Hague; Wiley
Article
- Published
- Authors
Abstract
India’s 2009 Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education (RTE) Act presents an idealised social contract which assigns roles to multiple actors to uphold a mutual duty, or collective responsibility, to secure children’s access to a quality school education. This article explores how the social contract assumed by the RTE Act misrepresents the conditions required to enact mutual responsibilities as well as actors’ agreement to do so. Qualitative data from Bihar and Rajasthan show how state actors, parents, community groups and teachers negotiate and contest the RTE Act norms. The analysis illuminates the unequal conditions and ever-present politics of accountability relations in education. It problematises the idealisation of the social contract in education reform: it proposes that if the relations of power and domination through which ‘contracts’ are entered into remain unaddressed, then expressions of ‘mutual’ responsibility are unlikely to do other than reproduce injustice. It argues that policy discourses need to recognise and attend to the socially situated contingencies of accountability relations and that doing so would offer an alternative pathway toward addressing structural inequalities and their manifestations in education.
Links
Article
Re-situating the Region: Media Technologies and Media Forms in India
in South Asian Popular Culture
- Published
- Authors
Abstract
There is an air of deceptive obviousness about the idea of the ‘region’. Inheriting a sense of assurance from long-established linguistic, geographical, and historical boundaries and contours, one feels secure in taking a somewhat simplistic cartographic view of the matter even as one acknowledges the overlaps and the blurring margins. But it shouldn’t take long to understand that the very use of the term ‘regional’ may imply that a researcher has probably placed himself/herself squarely at the centre, taking recourse to binary contrasts through a construct such as Bollywood or some other imaginary nub or vantage point from where she surveys the cultural margins, the nooks and the by lanes. What if one reverses this view to see things from within the region aiming one’s sights at the distant cultural firmaments? This is not mere wordplay but only an instance of everyday living! The real purpose here is to underline the plurality of stances, perspectives and viewpoints that may be applied for the study of culture. The ‘regional’ thus may mean not simply a location but also a stance and a perspective to be made explicit and to be acknowledged.
Authors:
Bindu Menon Mannil, Azim Premji University, Bengaluru
Ratnakar Tripathy, Asian Development Research Institute, Patna