Rethinking education as a contradictory resource: Girls’ education in the Indian Himalayas

Abstract

Scholars are increasingly emphasizing the contradictory nature of schooling's social effects, often blending Sen's (2000) insights on education's empowering role with critical sociological work on schooling and inequality (e.g. Majumdar and Mooij, 2011; Morarji, 2014). This paper advances this literature through examining shifts in girls’ education in Bemni, Uttarakhand, India. The paper draws on two periods of ethnographic research – in 2003–2004 and between 2012 and 2017 – as a means of tracking long-term changes in the nature of the contradictions that young women experience. In the 1990s and early 2000s there was a marked increase in girls’ primary schooling in this village and Uttarakha..