Pedagogies of Aspiration: Anthropological Perspectives on Education in Liberalising India

Abstract

Through a discussion of the articles in this collection, the introduction explores the ways in which the inhabitations of liberalisation require and necessitate intensive self-fashioning from citizens. We call this protracted work on the self, which unsettles enduring pathways of social reproduction and avenues of social mobility, pedagogies of aspiration. Moving beyond debates about efficient markets versus a redistributive state as the ideal provider of education, we suggest that ethnographic inquiries that foreground the everyday experiences and stakes of fashioning aspirational selves in educational contexts help us understand the lived realities of democratic possibility in liberalising India today.