So far, research on school choice sets – decision about choosing a school from an available set of schools – has primarily regarded parents as key actors. Moving beyond, in this talk, I emphasise that children are important actors as they inform parental decisions to co-produce certain choice sets. I also critique market-based models for their implicit assumptions that school choice markets are fair and free of bias and for an oversimplification about considering all parents as a uniform category of 'rational consumers'. Through my ethnographic study across public and private schools in Bangalore, I argue that choice sets are situated in a subjective space within a stratified social context. I foreground how school-going Muslim children’s experiences interact with their families to produce school choices while accounting for their marginalisation at the intersections of religion, class and gender. I further demonstrate that factors like heterogeneities in social class, differential levels of religious discrimination/exclusion in schools, a need to protect their faith through education and the complex overlap between these were crucial in shaping choices.
About the speaker:
Ms Shaima Amatullah is a doctoral scholar in the School of Social Sciences at NIAS. Her research work uses an interdisciplinary approach, involving psychology, sociology and childhood and youth studies, to explore questions of the ways in which social representations and dominant discourses around Islam/Muslims influence identities of students from the Muslim community.