Category Archives: Winter Academy

Migration of African Muslim Students to West-Malaysia

Research Project (to be discussed at the Winter Academy) by Frauke-Katrin Kandale.

Frauke-Katrin Kandale is a postdoctoral researcher in the transdisciplinary research project “Africa’s Asian Option” and a lecturer at the department of Southeast Asian Studies, Goethe University Frankfurt. Her current research investigates the migration of African students to West-Malaysia, especially in the Klang Valley.

Malaysia as a Muslim majority society experiences an influx of students and migrants from different African countries. Compared to other preferred destinations for study and living, as the UK or US, growing numbers of African students opt for Malaysia due to comparably easy accessibility of entry visas and affordable living costs. Especially after September 11, 2001, Malaysia positioned itself as an alternative study destination for those international students from the Middle East and sub-Saharan Africa who were not able to enter North American universities because of their Islamic religion. For the Malaysian private higher education sector, African students from upper middle class backgrounds turned out to be a well-paying target group. Approximately 25 000 African students are currently enrolled at public and private institutions of higher education in Malaysia. The Islamic religion, as well as English as the language of instruction, become important pull-factors when choosing Malaysia for study.

Although Malaysia is a multireligious and multiethnic society, African students are still a new phenomenon. Thus, they are sometimes labelled as Awang Hitam (black guy) actively engaged in the black market and in dark businesses. In this process of Othering, African migrants are being stereotyped as bogeyman by the Malaysian media. This paper will give insights in the lives and the coping strategies of young Africans from Nigeria and Sudan studying and working in the Klang Valley.

Primed to Labour: ‘Education’ in Industrial and Artisan Schools of Colonial India (1860s-1940s)

Research Project (to be discussed at the Winter Academy) by Arun Kumar.

Arun Kumar is a doctoral candidate in Medieval and Modern History at the Centre for Modern Indian Studies, Georg-August-Universität Gottingen. His research interests intersect educational and labour histories in colonial South Asia with focus on education of ‘labouring poor’, transnational circulation and transformation of ideas and practices in twentieth century, and everyday restructuring of caste hierarchies.

This thesis is about the poor and their education in colonial India. It enquires into the nature of education which was imparted to ‘educate’ poor children who were deemed unfit for book-centred, ‘proper’ schooling in didactic institutions such as industrial, reformatory and factory schools, rural schools, orphanages, children’s homes, workhouses, and railway workshops set up by Christian missionaries, ‘natives’, and colonial masters. The subject of these institutions were the ‘unruly and indolent’ class of low castes and untouchable poor, artisans and factory workers, peasants, beggars, vagrants, juvenile offenders, fakirs, gamblers, thieves, and criminal tribes. The thesis analyses the tension between the stated objectives of these institutions which was to produce an educated, disciplined, and semi-skilled work force and the poor’s aspiration for social and material upward mobility by getting a post in colonial offices.

This thesis will look into the issues of poor childhood, child labour, production and reproduction of social hierarchies. While looking in and out of the British Empire, the thesis will also look at the flow of pedagogic ideas and practices from Germany, Britain, and America in colonial geographies to show how the local institutions were fitted in the global pattern and yet were not global. It examines the circulation, contestation, appropriation, and transformation of ideas to educate, train, regulate, order and reform both morally and physically the bodies of the poor children in colonies. By looking at the everyday histories of schooling for the poor in India at the fin de siècle, this work unfolds the shared global vision of an education attempting to reform the figure of the ‘poor’ in nineteenth and twentieth century. To trace these networks of clues, this thesis uses missionary and colonial writings, school records, vernacular literature, and oral testimonies.

The Informal Education Sector in Egypt: Between State, Market and Civil Society

Research Project (to be discussed at the Winter Academy) by Sarah Hartmann.

Sarah Hartmann is a doctoral candidate at the Berlin Graduate School Muslim Cultures and Societies at Freie Universität Berlin. Her research interests include youth, education and social class in the Arab World as well as anthropological and political science approaches to statehood and informality.

This PhD project explores the relationship between Egyptian citizens and the state through an analysis of the widespread practice of private tutoring for school students, i.e. by taking a closer look at the coexistence, interdependence and entanglement of formal institutions and informal practices in the Egyptian education sector. Based on 12 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Cairo in 2009-2010, it provides a detailed account and analysis of some of the institutions, actors, social relations, and discourses involved in the provision of supplementary tutoring for school students, with a special focus on tutoring centers in lower income neighborhoods of Cairo. Despite its socio-economic and political significance, no in-depth ethnographic study of this phenomenon has been undertaken so far. The project aims to contribute to current debates on statehood and informal institutions in anthropology and political science. While tutoring developed as a coping strategy to compensate for the deficiencies of an underfunded and overburdened public education system, a means for teachers to supplement their meager salaries, and a strategy for students and parents confronted with the pressures of a strongly examination-oriented education system, it has turned into a generalized and deeply engrained feature of Egyptian educational culture during the last decades, with social, economic and political effects and implications that go far beyond the teaching and learning process itself. The ideal of the welfare state is increasingly replaced by neoliberal values of entrepreneurship, consumerism, and the privatization of risk and responsibility, rendering access to education and other services dependent on the financial means of the individual.

The politics of higher education and the everyday life of students in Jordan and Egypt

Research Project (to be discussed at the Winter Academy) by Daniele Cantini.

Daniele Cantini is a senior research fellow at the research cluster “Society and Culture in Motion” at the Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg. His doctoral dissertation dealt with the Jordanian university system and its students. Currently, he is editing a volume on ethnographies of private universities.

This research takes the university as a vantage point to look at continuities and changes in the ways in which youth in Egypt and Jordan is socialized, citizenship is built, and differences are created and sustained. Both Egypt and Jordan witnessed a post-colonial nationalist and more or less socialist state, in which the function of the few state universities was clearly to serve the state in its efforts to modernise the country and its citizenry. This trajectory was ultimately altered in the ’90s, when the effects of the new international economic policies and the changes in the demographic composition of the countries contributed to erode the role of the state in providing employment and sense of belonging. These pushed for new directions in university policies–opening up to private universities, also of foreign origin, and partial privatizations within the public ones that were becoming less and less able to fulfil their roles. Through an ethnographic analysis of how the university concretely works, the project looks at this crucial institution to try to make sense of the most recent changes in its governance. Here the interest lies in understanding the different contexts, the local and the global, and their numerous intersections and conflicts. This project then looks at how all these affect the lives of youth. It explores in particular three dimensions of youth´s subjectivity, namely the political, the religious and the social (their place in the wider society as reproduced within the microcosm of the university campus and life).

Teachers’ Struggle for Income in the Congo (DRC). Between Education and Remuneration

Research Project (to be discussed at the Winter Academy) by Cyril Owen Brandt.

Cyril Owen Brandt is currently a PhD candidate at the Amsterdam Institute of Social Science Research, University of Amsterdam. He is researching teacher pay in contexts that are conflict-affected and lack functioning public administration.

As the ambivalent role of education for sustainable peace building is gaining increasing attention in international debates, it is important to analyze the conditions under which education is taking place. The provision of education in so-called conflict-affected and fragile countries depends on a range of factors, among which teacher remuneration plays a pivotal role.

The Congolese education sector is characterized by a gradual retreat of the state in the provision of education and an increasing authority and decision-making power of local actors. The predominance of uncodified practical norms causes constant negotiations between different actors. Among these, teachers have the particular role of providing education to the students. They must do so in a multi-scalar context of reconstruction agendas, inadequate payment, erroneous administration, practical norms and competition between schools for students. Moreover, there are a range of ambiguous effects from global and national agendas, e.g. around free primary education.

Previous studies have outlined the structural impacts on teachers, but none focused on their agency. If teachers are still coping with their very basic needs due to their income situation, quality of education is not the primary or sole concern of their everyday actions. Hence, they have developed a range of strategies to exercise their agency in relation to their income.

Teachers must invest time and money for different purposes in order to be registered and paid. They do so vis-à-vis governmental brokers in a corrupt environment. At other times, they have common objectives with parents with whom they cooperate. Moreover, there is not one teacher employment status, but a range of de facto statuses. For instance some teachers are only paid locally by parents and do not receive any governmental money.

The research design is based on the Extended Case Method and was conceived in order to allow a thorough analysis of the complex multi-scalar political economy concerning the school and teacher registration system and teacher payment. Theoretical choices include the Strategic-Relational Approach and a focus on Real Governance.

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List of Winter Academy Participants Online

The list of participants and project titles of the international winter academy “Inequality, Education and Social Power: Transregional Perspectives” can now be found in the participants section. More information on the academic backgrounds of the participants as well as their research projects will soon be posted on this blog.

Twenty Participants Selected for Winter Academy “Inequality, Education and Social Power”

Six members of the Steering Committee have faced the difficult task of selecting 20 participants out of almost 100 applications for the International Winter Academy “Inequality, Education and Social Power: Transregional Perspectives”.

The selection process is now completed and you will soon find a list of selected candidates on this blog. The participants come from Africa, Asia, the Middle East, Europe and Latin America. They have a wide range of disciplinary backgrounds, coming from such different fields as educational studies, sociology, cultural studies, social sciences, economics, development studies, anthropology, history as well as different area studies. The Steering Committee is very much looking forward to meeting this interesting group in Berlin in November 2014!

TRG “Poverty and Education in India” will particpate in Winter Academy

We are pleased to announce the first participants of the Winter Academy “Inequality, Education and Social Power”: The fellows of the Transnational Research Group India (TRG) at the German Historical Institute London.

The research focus of the TRG is India: the group’s research theme is “Poverty Reduction and Policy for the Poor between the State and Private Actors: Education Policy in India since the Nineteenth Century” and the TRG fellows’ studies range from caste discrimination and education policy to the impact of schooling on life histories. At the same time, the group is sensitive to the global entanglements of the subject, and has a keen interest in encouraging comparative research, for instance by organizing and participating in conferences and workshops on comparative research on the theme. The TRG also offers visiting fellowships to scholars working on different regions.

Find out more about the Transnational Research Group India on their website or “like” them on Facebook!