Living the neoliberal global schooling project: an ethnography of childhood and everyday choices in Nepal
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Date
27/11/2018Author
Baxter, Katherine Dickson
Metadata
Abstract
This research draws upon interdisciplinary studies of childhood and young
people’s agency to present an ethnographic account of one group of young
people in Nepal’s lived experience of ‘the global schooling project’, a term used
to describe the series of policy initiatives and the complex landscape of actors
and institutions furthering the aim of getting every child, everywhere into school.
Based on five months of fieldwork in which I intimately embedded myself in the
everyday lives and social, emotional worlds of a group of young people living on
Mansawar Street in Pokhara, I show how the global schooling project and its
values impact upon their childhoods and everyday choices, shaping their
aspirations, daily routines and self-conceptions, and those of their families and
communities. I bring attention to how these flattening policy initiatives can have
the effect of marginalising many of these young people’s unique talents, interest
and competencies, not accounting for the diversity of their learning and their
agencies in moving through and making sense of their everyday material and
immaterial worlds. I emphasise how schooling can act as an ambiguous
resource for these young people, not only providing opportunity, knowledge and
pathways towards employment, but also drawing them into systems of
inequality and exploitation, both inside and outside of school. This research,
then, provides an account of the lived experience of schooling on Mansawar
Street and the profound ways in which schooling shapes local economies and
ecologies, transforming family and community relationships and young people’s
childhoods.