Dr Uma Pradhan

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Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow

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

 

For this fellowship, her research will examine the contested process of everyday state-building 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 currently under-contract 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 Disciplines:
  • Education
  • Anthropology
  • Development Studies
Research Keywords:
  • Nepal, ethnicity, education, nationalism
Countries:
  • Nepal, South Asia
Research Cluster:

 

Email: uma.pradhan@area.ox.ac.uk

 

Selected Publications

 

Monograph (under contract). New Languages of Schooling: Nationalism, Minority Identity, and Education in Nepal, Cambridge University Press. 

Forthcoming, 2018       Simultaneous identities: ethnicity and nationalism in mother tongue education in Nepal. Nations and Nationalism Journal.

Forthcoming, 2018       Education ethnography: anthropological knowledge production in education, Oxford Research Encyclopaedia in Education (co-authored with Karen Valentin).

Forthcoming, 2018       From Language to Script: Constructing linguistic authority through language contact in schools in Nepal, In (Eds.) Mark Turin and Selma Sonntag, Politics of Language Contact in the Himalayas, Cambridge:      Open Book Publishers.

2017                 Constructing knowledge, contesting legitimacy: knowledge-making in mother-tongue education schools in Nepal’, Ethnography and Education 12(3): 381-394.

2018                 National education system in Nepal: between the ‘local’ and the ‘global’, In H. Letchamanan (Ed.) Education in South Asia, London: Bloomsbury Publications (part of Education Around the World Series), pp 165-183.

2016                 New languages of schooling: dynamics of ethnicity and education in Nepal, HIMALAYA, The Journal of the Association for Nepal and Himalayan Studies 36(2): 9-21.

2006                 Pluralism and civil society partnerships: perspectives from Nepal and Uttar Pradesh’, Contemporary South Asia 15(1): 55-75. (co-authored with Indrajit Roy) 

2007                 The child-to-child approach to community and health development in South Asia. Children, Youth and Environments, 17(1): 257-268. 

2006                 ‘Sorry Kids, You are girls: gender bias in education, Combat Law, 5 (1): 80- 81. 

 

Selected Talks

 

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).

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

    PRADHAN, U
    2018
    |
    Journal article
    |
    Nations and Nationalism

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

    PRADHAN, U
    Edited by:
    Letchamanan, H
    2018
    |
    Chapter
    |
    Education in South Asia

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

    Pradhan, U
    2017
    |
    Journal article
    |
    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
    |
    Journal article
    |
    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.

  • The Child-to-Child Approach to Community and Health Development in South Asia

    PRADHAN, U
    2007
    |
    Journal article
    |
    Children, youth and environments

  • Pluralism and civil society partnerships: Perspectives from Nepal and Uttar Pradesh

    Pradhan, U, Roy, I
    2006
    |
    Journal article
    |
    Contemporary South Asia
    Hitherto, South Asian governments have found it convenient to arbitrate between different sections and communities. Increasingly, however, as a multiplicity of demands surface articulating the democratic aspirations of marginalised castes, creeds, tribal peoples and other ethnic groups, governments must work in collaboration with actors in civil society. As monolithically constructed communities are splintered along 'local' constituents and development agencies relate rights-based programming with disaggregated data on caste, class and gender, the possibilities for multiculturalism become manifold. Democratic pluralism is key to development. This paper is based on fieldwork in two contiguous regions of South Asia; the Himalayan kingdom of Nepal, and the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh. On the one hand, this region has been the hotbed of linguo-religious identity construction and contestation since at least the 1870s, and especially after the 1920s. On the other hand, it has recently been witness to the emergence of strong political movements among hitherto 'untouchable' Dalits and landless classes, and the active interest of development agencies. Three broad themes are explored through this paper; the impact of development and markets on Dalit communities, cultures of subjugation and protest among them, and the impact of community-based groups on how they are able to negotiate and contest their disadvantages. The emergence of community-based organisations, especially those formed during the course of the struggle for labour rights, are seen as contributing to democratic pluralism. At the same time, the paper advises caution by emphasising that the formation of community-based organisations is no substitute for political advocacy or technical solutions; rather, they must be grounded in local traditions of protest to be effective.
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