Dr Uma Pradhan | South Asian Studies

Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow

Uma Pradhan is Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow, Oxford School for Global and Area Studies & Junior Research Fellow, Wolfson College. Her research focuses on power-laden dimensions of education and examines the interconnection between state, society, and schooling.

Her current research examines the contested process of everyday state-making through a study on school reconstruction projects in post-earthquake Nepal. Taking ‘reconstruction’ as an analytic space of possibility, this research investigates, firstly, the rebuilding of physical spaces and, secondly, the reconstruction of discursive spaces within which they are embedded i.e. ideas and narratives about the (failing) state education system in Nepal. This research will specifically focus on ‘aftermath epistemology’ to understand the ways in which a post-disaster shock is utilised to construct new visions for collective futures. By drawing attention to ongoing and new interventions by the state in spaces where everyday life is disrupted by a disaster, this aims to explore everyday practices of the state and the ways in which state is experienced, engaged with, and re-imagined by people.

Uma received her DPhil in International Development (2016) from University of Oxford, where she studied the cultural politics of minority language use in schools. Drawing on the broader context of language politics in Nepal and on fieldwork in mother-tongue schools, her research discussed the ways in which students made meaning in their everyday world by maintaining multi-layered identities, and its implications in the changing socio-political context of Nepal. She received the Dor Bahadur Bista prize 2015 (http://anhs-himalaya.org/dor-bahadur-bista-awards-pages/page/2/) and Nations and Nationalism prize 2018 (https://asen.ac.uk/awards/essay-prize/) for the articles based on this research. Her monograph is forthcoming with Cambridge University Press.

Prior to joining OSGA, she was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow (2016-2018) at the Department of Education Anthropology, Aarhus University, Copenhagen. Her research at Aarhus focused on understanding the ways in which public funding for the education of marginalised groups shape the relationship between state and citizens. She is co-editing (with Karen Valentin) a special issue based on this research.

Before joining academia, Uma worked in the development sector for several years.

Research Interests

Select Publications

Towards a Relational Approach to the State: Understanding Social and Political Transformation in Nepal

Pradhan, U, Valentin, K

2019
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Journal article
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South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies
3. Transforming Language to Script: Constructing Linguistic Authority through Language Contact in Schools in Nepal

Pradhan, U

2019
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Chapter
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The Politics of Language Contact in the Himalaya
Ethnographies of Education and Anthropological Locations

PRADHAN, U, Valentin, K

Edited by:
Noblit, G

2019
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Chapter
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Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Education

From an anthropological perspective, (educational) ethnography is much more than just a method in terms of a set of techniques but a way of taking a place in and grasping the world that ethnographers aim to represent and comprehend. With an imperative of “being there,” the ethnographer travels to specific locations to establish some form of physical presence in the field site. The idea of “location,” therefore, is central to educational ethnography in several ways. Research on education among different categories of people in Nepal, and a vast body of ethnographic literature on education around the world, demonstrates the centrality of “location” in anthropological knowledge production. This article discusses “location” as a conceptual category in order to explore the different analytical levels at which it operates in anthropological knowledge production on education. It does so in three different ways. First, ethnographers’ locations in the field—their biographical trajectories, academic backgrounds, and social positions—lay the ground for the ways in which ethnographers ‘see’ education in the field. Second, the historical context and sociopolitical developments of specific geographic locations, in this case Nepal, draw attention to ways in which existing societal concerns foster particular research interests on education and consequently shape knowledge about a given geographical location. Third, conducting ethnographic fieldwork in a variety of spatial sites within and beyond institutions of schooling allows ethnographers to explore the multiple and often conflicting meanings of education. This awareness on the multiplicity of ethnographic locations in educational ethnography promises to deepen our understanding of education, broadly defined, through a rigorous and highly contextualized inquiry that highlights multiple and contested voices and presents subjective modes of perceiving reality.

Nepal, anthropological locations, education ethnography
Interrogating quality: minority language, education and imageries of competence in Nepal

Pradhan, U

2019
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Journal article
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Compare: A Journal of Comparative and International Education
Disjunctured reciprocity: paradoxes of community-school relationship in Nepal

Pradhan, U, Shrestha, S, Valentin, K

2019
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Journal article
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Globalisation, Societies and Education
Multi-Ethnic Citizens in a Multi-Ethnic State: Constructing State–Citizen Relations Through ‘Difference’ in the Adivasi Janajati Scholarship Programmes in Nepal

Pradhan, U

2019
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Journal article
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South Asia: Journal of South Asia Studies

© 2019, © 2019 South Asian Studies Association of Australia. In 1990, the Constitution of Nepal declared Nepal a multi-ethnic (bahujatiya) country. This newly transformed state promised better inclusion of marginalised groups through special provisions. How has this been operationalised, and what does this mean in practice for the members of the groups concerned? Drawing on fieldwork in the Nepal Foundation for Development of Indigenous Nationalities (NFDIN), this paper argues that the Nepali state’s moral and political obligation to address long-standing concerns about group-based inequalities has opened up intriguing new spaces to perform and redefine state–society relations. Within these new spaces, categories of difference are constantly invoked and experienced, where both the state and citizens come to co-constitute each other in a variety of new ways.
Simultaneous identities: ethnicity and nationalism in mother tongue education in Nepal

PRADHAN, U

2018
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Journal article
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Nations and Nationalism

© The author(s) 2018. Nations and Nationalism © ASEN/John Wiley & Sons Ltd 2018. The scholarly works on ethnicity and nationalism have been highly dominated by binary frameworks. In addition, the normative preference for civic consciousness and the concerns of national disintegration often separate the notions of ethnicity and nationalism. This article suggests that the notions of ethnicity and nationalism cannot be understood exclusively as a choice between maintaining the integrity of the nation and completely rejecting it. Drawing on fieldwork in mother tongue schools in Nepal, the article draws attention to the ways in which school actors discursively positioned ethnic identity as imperative to national identity, the one that bolsters the notion of Nepali nationhood. By paying close attention to the everyday context within which discourses of nationalism are situated, this article argues for an analytical necessity to approach ethnicity and nationalism in relation to each other to appreciate the process of symbolic negotiations in public spaces.
National education system in Nepal: between the ‘local’ and the ‘global’

PRADHAN, U

Edited by:
Letchamanan, H

2018
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Chapter
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Education in South Asia
Contesting knowledge, constructing legitimacy: knowledge making in mother-tongue education schools in Nepal

Pradhan, U

2017
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Journal article
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Ethnography and Education

© 2017 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. Scholars in education have drawn our attention to the ways in which social power and control manifests in the process of knowledge production in education institutions especially through school curriculum. In this paper, I analyse school textbooks along with classroom instruction events and everyday practices in a mother-tongue school in Nepal. Drawing on the concept of ‘legitimate knowledge’, this paper discusses mother-tongue education as a struggle over symbolic resources, whereby familiarity with ‘daily life in the locality’ is discursively drawn upon to articulate mother tongue as an effective pedagogy and legitimate knowledge. The paper argues that the introduction of mother tongue in the school curriculum is, therefore, more than an addition of new language. It is a process of negotiating what it means to ‘know’ things in school. In doing so, this paper illustrates a dynamic process of re-signification of local languages, knowledge and identities that is underway.
New languages of schooling: Ethnicity, education, and equality in Nepal

Pradhan, U

2016
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Journal article
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Himalaya: Journal of the Association for Nepal and Himalayan Studies

Mother tongue education has remained a controversial issue in Nepal. Scholars, activists, and policy-makers have favored mother tongue education from the standpoint of social justice. Against these views, others have identified this effort as predominantly groupist in its orientation and not helpful in imagining a unified national community. Taking this contention as a point of inquiry, this paper explores the contested space of mother tongue education to understand the ways in which people position themselves within the polarizing debates of ethnicitybased claims on education in Nepal. Drawing from the ethnographic fieldwork in a mother tongue education school, I illustrate that the students made meaning in their everyday world by maintaining the multilingual repertoire that included their mother tongue, Nepali, and some English; multilingualism was used as a strategy for mother tongue education. I propose a notion of simultaneity to explain this attempt to seek membership into multiple groups and display of apparently contradictory dynamics. On the one hand, the practices in these schools display inwardlooking characteristics through the everyday use of mother tongue, the construction of unified ethnic identity, and cultural practices. On the other hand, outward-looking dynamics of making claims in the universal spaces of national education and public places could also be seen. The salience of these processes is the simultaneous membership to multiple groups, claims over public spaces and in the spaces of nationalism, hitherto associated with Nepali language. Contrary to the essentialist categories espoused in both nationalist discourse and ethnic activism, students in these schools display affiliation to multiple languages and identities that were seen as neither incompatible nor binary opposites.

Teaching

2019/20. Course design and teaching, ‘Education, State, and Society in South Asia’ MPhil and MSc in Modern South Asian Studies, Oxford School of Global and Area Studies, University of Oxford.

2018-19. Contribute to lectures and classes on MPhil/MSc in Modern South Asian Studies, Oxford School of Global and Area Studies, University of Oxford.

2015-2019. Tutor, ‘History and Politics of South Asia’, Options course for Development Studies, Modern South Asian Studies, and Politics, Philosophy and Economics (PPE), University of Oxford.

2018/19. Tutor, ‘Anthropology of South Asia’, Options course for Anthropology and Modern South Asian Studies, University of Oxford.

2016. Course design and teaching, Six-week module on ‘State, Society and Schooling: Governing Education in South Asia’, Aarhus University (Denmark) and Kathmandu University- Martin Chautari (Nepal).

2014-2016. Graduate Teaching Assistant, MPhil in Development Studies, Department of International Development & MSc in Contemporary India, School of Interdisciplinary Area Studies, University of Oxford.

Talks

CONFERENCE PRESENTATIONS

2018. Education ethnography: anthropological knowledge production in education, Education and Ethnography Conference, University of Oxford. 18-20 Sept

2018. Social and political transformation in Nepal: ethnographic perspectives on state-citizen relations, Workshop co-organised with Karen Valentin (14-18 May)

2017. Nation and nationalism in mother-tongue textbooks in Nepal, Panel: Nationalism and Education in Nepal, Himalayan Studies Conference, University of Colorado Boulder, USA (September 1-4)

2017. ‘What is South Asia?” South Asia political thought seminar series, University of Oxford (November 20)

2017. Becoming ‘eligible’: documents, intermediary actors, and the state in education scholarship programmes, Panel: Public Finance Dynamics in School Education in Nepal, Himalayan Studies Conference, University of Colorado Boulder, USA (September 1-4) and Annual Kathmandu Conference on Nepal and Himalaya, Kathmandu (26-28 July)

2016. ‘Durga Kami: caste and education in Nepal’, Caste in South Asia Conference, Oxford (July 2016)

2016. ‘New languages of schooling’, Martin Chautari Research Centre, Nepal (4 March)

2015. ‘Constructing knowledge, contesting legitimacy: knowledge-making in mother-tongue education schools in Nepal’, Ethnography and Education Conference, University of Oxford, UK (September 5-8)

2014. ‘Deficit discourse in minority language education’, British Association for International and Comparative Education (BAICE) thematic group meeting, University of Leeds, UK (July 2014)

2014. ‘Learning the new Nepal: reconstituting educational space in multi-lingual schools in Nepal’ paper presented in British Association for International and Comparative Education (BAICE) Conference, University of Bath, UK (September 2014)

2014. ‘Ethnicity, equality and education in Nepal’ work in progress presented QEH DPhil Seminar Series, University of Oxford, UK (July 2014)

CONFERENCE AND SEMINAR ORGANISED

2018. Co-convenor (with Karen Valentin), ‘Social and political transformation in Nepal: ethnographic perspectives on state-citizen relations’ Two-day workshop at Aarhus University, Copenhagen (May 14-15, 2018)

2017. Panel Co-convenor, Navigating state institutions in the Himalayas: ethnographic perspective. Himalayan Studies Conference, University of Colorado Boulder, USA (Sept 1-4)

2016. Convenor, Wolfson Graduate Student Workshop, ‘What is South Asia?’ (May 2016)

2015-16. Co- Convenor, DPhil Seminar series, QEH, University of Oxford, 2015 – 2016

2015. Co-Convenor, Research Methods @ QEH Seminar series, QEH, University of Oxford, Hilary Term 2015

Contact Information

Towards a Relational Approach to the State: Understanding Social and Political Transformation in Nepal

3. Transforming Language to Script: Constructing Linguistic Authority through Language Contact in Schools in Nepal

Ethnographies of Education and Anthropological Locations

Interrogating quality: minority language, education and imageries of competence in Nepal

Disjunctured reciprocity: paradoxes of community-school relationship in Nepal

Multi-Ethnic Citizens in a Multi-Ethnic State: Constructing State–Citizen Relations Through ‘Difference’ in the Adivasi Janajati Scholarship Programmes in Nepal

Simultaneous identities: ethnicity and nationalism in mother tongue education in Nepal

National education system in Nepal: between the ‘local’ and the ‘global’

Contesting knowledge, constructing legitimacy: knowledge making in mother-tongue education schools in Nepal

New languages of schooling: Ethnicity, education, and equality in Nepal

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