Arathi Sriprakash
Biographic Data
| ID | 110344 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Arathi Sriprakash |
| GIVEN NAMES | Arathi |
| FAMILY NAME | Sriprakash |
| SIGNATURE | SRIPRAKASH A |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Cambridge |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-3655-0605 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 48 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 301 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 47 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2009 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 9 |
The structural conditions and lived experiences of racism in education
This Forum shines a light on the complex and often devastating ways in which the structural conditions and lived experiences of racism interact with each other through education. We bring together discussions that took place as part of the 2025 BAICE Presidential Workshop series, highlighting new research on racial justice in CIE. Through the diversity of the frameworks and positions offered in this Forum, we suggest multivocality and interconnec…
Organised abandonment in education
Towards spatial-reparative frameworks for education
If we are to address the injustices embedded in social and educational systems, we must deepen our collective understanding and consciousness of their intertwined geographies and histories. This paper explores geographical arguments for reparative justice in education drawing on early findings from the Reparative Futures of Education (Repair-Ed) project, based in the city of Bristol in the Southwest of England. Focusing on one of Bristol’s munici…
Repair-Ed in conversation: How race and class shape experiences of school
Algorithmic futuring: Predictive infrastructures of valuation and investment in the assetization of edtech
Futures of education are increasingly defined through predictive technologies and methods. We conceptualize ‘algorithmic futuring’ as the use of data-driven digital methods and predictive infrastructures to anticipate educational futures and animate actions in the present towards their materialization. Specifically, we focus on algorithmic futuring in the education technology investment industry, and the role of predictive infrastructures of valu…
Sociodigital futures of education: Reparations, sovereignty, care, and democratisation
As EdTech industries grow in reach and power it is imperative to motivate conditions for ethical challenge and contestation, always remaining attentive to the kinds of education futures that dominant imaginaries of technology foreclose. In this paper, we explore how the multiple lenses of reparations, sovereignty, care and democratisation can offer resources for envisaging alternative sociodigital futures of education. We identify how these ideas…
A case for embedding structural analyses of race and racism in comparative and international education
Race and racism are global historically-shaped structures that affecteducational systems and practices across the world. Thus, they shouldbe key concerns of comparative and international education (CIE) –a position that is increasingly recognised within the field. In this paper,we explore the possibilities and resources of three interlinked analy-tical perspectives – racialisation, racial states, and colonial racial capit-alism – for the field of…
Reparative futures for international and comparative education
On justice and education: A conversation with Edward Said’s work
This conversational piece is part of the Special Issue Edward Said: Unsettling Education in a Fragmented World. It takes inspiration from Said's many forms of public engagement and puts some of his ideas about justice into dialogue with complex issues facing the field of education: imperialism, nationalism and contrapuntal histories of radical humanism, resistance and redress. We reflect on how Said's critical scholarship may challenge and suppor…
Reparative histories of schooling
Reparative futures
The past is present in all future making activities. However, there is more that futuring processes can do to engage with past-present relationships, namely by bringing to the fore frameworks of reparation and redress. This article explores how ideas of reparative action may offer generative resources for Futures Studies. It suggests that in order to create futures characterised by justice it is essential to listen to and engage with ongoing hist…
Learning from the Movement for Black Lives: Horizons of Racial Justice for Comparative and International Education
This opening editorial for the special issue “Black Lives Matter and Global Struggles for Racial Justice in Education” engages with the theory and praxis of Black Lives Matter (BLM). One cannot fully understand the powerful intellectual and political work of BLM without considering the macro-level structural forces of state violence, racial capitalism, and anti-Blackness that BLM boldly challenges. To this end, the editorial first outlines the or…
Reparations: Theorising Just Futures of Education
This conceptual paper examines reparations as a vital yet under-researched orientation to justice in education. The idea of reparations requires us to understand the interconnections between past, present and future in both the formation of injustice and its repair. It implies that until injustices are actively addressed they can endure in social institutions – like education – which also shape lives-to-come. The paper explores material, epistemi…
Learning Whiteness: Education and the Settler Colonial State
Education and #StopAsianHate: A global conversation
The COVID-19 pandemic has witnessed an increase and amplification of anti-Asian racism and violence across the globe. Stop AAPI Hate1 in the United States and the COVID-19 Racism Incident Report2 in Australia have documented this rising overt racism and violence against Asians. The killings of 6 Asian women in the United States in 2021, which was racially motivated, highlighted and brought this racial injustice to the fore
The Social Contract and India's Right to Education
India's 2009 Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education (RTE) Act presents an idealized social contract which assigns roles to multiple actors to uphold a mutual duty, or collective responsibility, to secure children's access to a quality school education. This article explores how the social contract assumed by the RTE Act misrepresents the conditions required to enact mutual responsibilities as well as actors' agreement to do so. Qualit…
Special Issue: Black Lives Matter and Global Struggles for Racial Justice in Education
Education and racial capitalism
This paper works with theories of racial capitalism to show how formal education has been produced through interlocking systems of domination: capitalism, racism, and colonialism. With a focus on the enduring histories of British settler colonialism, we put forward a framework for analysing the constitutive relationship between contemporary systems of education and racial capitalism. The paper discusses three connected relations: (I) the ongoing …
Provincialising Futures Literacy: A caution against codification
Normative development in rural India: ‘School Readiness’ and Early Childhood Care and Education
Global education agendas frequently draw on the construct of ‘school readiness’, indexing the developmental trajectories of children to the expectations of school systems. Through in-depth ethnographic research in a village in Bihar, India, this paper examines how normative discourses of ‘school readiness’ govern family strategies for early childhood care and education (ECCE). To navigate the demandsof a competitive and socially stratified school…
Disruptive knowledge: Sociologies of educational spaces and processes
Learning, teaching, ‘searching’, and ‘healing’: Conceptual and practical challenges for education
The erasures of racism in education and international development: Re-reading the ‘global learning crisis’
Despite pervasive forms of racism on a global scale, the field of education and international development continues to fail to substantively engage with the production and effects of racial domination across its domains of research, policy and practice. Considerations of racism remain silent, or indeed, are erased, within teaching and research, often in favour of colour-blind and technocratic approaches to ‘development’. This not only ignores the…
The science of childhood and the pedagogy of the state: Postcolonial development in India, 1950s
This article examines how, in the decade following India's independence, the psychology of childhood became a locus of experimentation, and an avenue through which approaches to postcolonial development were expressed. Tracing the ideas of educational reformers, psychological researchers and child welfare advocates, we show how a 'science of childhood' in this period emphasised both the inherent potential and the emotional complexity of India's y…
Knowledge and racial violence: The shine and shadow of ‘powerful knowledge’
This paper offers a critique of ‘powerful knowledge’ – a concept in Education Studies that has been presented as a just basis for school curricula. Powerful knowledge is disciplinary knowledge produced and refined through a process of ‘specialisation’ that usually occurs in universities. Drawing on postcolonial, decolonial and Indigenous studies, we show how powerful knowledge seems to focus on the progressive impulse of modernity (its ‘shine’) w…
Toward a Postcolonial Comparative and International Education
This article, which serves to introduce the special issue on "Contesting Coloniality: Rethinking Knowledge Production and Circulation in Comparative and International Education," brings to the fore the rarely acknowledged colonial entanglements of knowledge in the field of comparative and international education (CIE). We begin by showing how colonial logics underpin the scholarship of one of the field's founding figures, Isaac L. Kandel. These l…
Education and racial capitalism
This paper works with theories of racial capitalism to show how formal education has been produced through interlocking systems of domination: capitalism, racism, and colonialism. With a focus on the enduring histories of British settler colonialism, we put forward a framework for analysing the constitutive relationship between contemporary systems of education and racial capitalism. The paper discusses three connected relations: (I) the ongoing …
The Politics of Post-Qualitative Inquiry: History and Power
In this article, we offer a critical reading of the increasingly popular "post-qualitative" approach to research. We draw on insights from postcolonial theory to offer some provocations about the methodological and conceptual claims made by post-qualitative inquiry. The article considers how post-qualitative inquiry opens up possibilities for post-humanist social research. But, our critical reading of these "new" approaches argues that such resea…
The erasures of racism in education and international development: Re-reading the ‘global learning crisis’
Despite pervasive forms of racism on a global scale, the field of education and international development continues to fail to substantively engage with the production and effects of racial domination across its domains of research, policy and practice. Considerations of racism remain silent, or indeed, are erased, within teaching and research, often in favour of colour-blind and technocratic approaches to ‘development’. This not only ignores the…
Child-centred education and the promise of democratic learning: Pedagogic messages in rural Indian primary schools
Visible pedagogic work: Parenting, private tutoring and educational advantage in Australia
This article explores parents’ use of private tutoring services for their primary school children in Sydney, Australia's largest city. Using Bernstein's theories of invisible and visible pedagogies, we look, through the eyes of a small group of middle-class Chinese-background interviewees, at the tensions between certain pedagogic forms associated with private tutoring and schooling in contemporary contexts of educational competition. We show how…
Reparations: Theorising Just Futures of Education
This conceptual paper examines reparations as a vital yet under-researched orientation to justice in education. The idea of reparations requires us to understand the interconnections between past, present and future in both the formation of injustice and its repair. It implies that until injustices are actively addressed they can endure in social institutions – like education – which also shape lives-to-come. The paper explores material, epistemi…
The governance of families in India: Education, rights and responsibility
This paper examines the shifting relations between the family and the state in Indian education policy. It charts how family resources, responsibility, and participation have been variously called upon by the state across three historical conjunctures of education reform: the decades of post-independence planning for school expansion and nation-building after 1947; the global development era of economic liberalisation and decentralisation in the …
Provincialising Futures Literacy: A caution against codification
Reflexivity and the politics of knowledge: Researchers as ‘brokers’ and ‘translators’ of educational development
This paper interrogates the ways in which ‘reflexivity’ has proliferated as a normative methodological discourse in the field of international and comparative education. We argue that the dominant approach to reflexivity foregrounds the standpoints of researchers and their subjects in a way that does not attend to the situated, contingent, and relational dynamics of ‘knowing’ itself. This too easily bypasses the performative effects of research; …
Bernstein revisited: The recontextualisation of equity in contemporary Australian school education
This article draws on the sociology of Basil Bernstein to show how his detailed theories of ‘recontextualisation’ and the ‘pedagogic device’ provide useful analytic levers to examine the politics of educational change. We focus on recent policy developments that have significantly impacted Australian school education: the Program for International Student Assessment; the National Assessment Programme for Numeracy and Literacy; and the government’…
Joyful Learning’ in rural Indian primary schools: An analysis of social control in the context of child‐centred discourses
Efforts to improve the ‘quality’ of education for all in government primary schools in India have seen a shift towards child‐centred teaching. This paper examines the ‘Joyful Learning’ programme, an example of a pedagogic reform implemented in rural primary schools in the southern Indian state of Karnataka. Through an empirical analysis of teachers’ pedagogic discourses, I explore what it means to introduce child‐centred pedagogic principles in l…
Reparative futures
The past is present in all future making activities. However, there is more that futuring processes can do to engage with past-present relationships, namely by bringing to the fore frameworks of reparation and redress. This article explores how ideas of reparative action may offer generative resources for Futures Studies. It suggests that in order to create futures characterised by justice it is essential to listen to and engage with ongoing hist…
Reparative histories of schooling
Normative development in rural India: ‘School Readiness’ and Early Childhood Care and Education
Global education agendas frequently draw on the construct of ‘school readiness’, indexing the developmental trajectories of children to the expectations of school systems. Through in-depth ethnographic research in a village in Bihar, India, this paper examines how normative discourses of ‘school readiness’ govern family strategies for early childhood care and education (ECCE). To navigate the demandsof a competitive and socially stratified school…
Race and legitimacy: Historical formations of academically selective schooling in Australia
A growing body of research has examined the academic success of ‘Asian’ diaspora students in North America, the UK, and Australia, much of it positioning ‘culture’ as a central analytic concern. Taking the category ‘Asian’ as a concept formed through the imagination and reduction of geopolitical and cultural histories, this article addresses the phenomenon of Asian educational success as it is constituted historically and politically rather than …
The uses of equality in an elite school in India: Enterprise and merit
This article examines the different uses of equality in one elite international school in India. We focus on how conceptions of equality can be enrolled into particular scripts of benevolence and gifting through which elite distinctions are constituted and enacted. Our analysis of interviews with students, teachers and parents in the school highlights three dominant and interrelated uses of equality that are examined with respect to entrepreneuri…
New learner subjects? Reforming the rural child for a modern India
This article discusses findings from an ethnographic study of schooling in India to reflect on the ways in which new learner subjects – the ideal citizens of the future – are constructed by education reforms in poor, rural communities. The concerns of the article are framed by the significant economic growth and social modernisation occurring in India, particularly for the expanding urban middle classes. The rural poor have been largely excluded …
Global frameworks, local contingencies: Policy translations and education development in India
Policies and programmes pursuing the universalisation of elementary education (UEE) in developing nations have been influenced by a set of complex forces in international, state, and local arenas. This paper explores how a large‐scale standardised assessment programme shaped by international and market‐oriented discourses has been differently re‐worked in the south Indian state of Karnataka. We draw on observation and interview data with educator…
The contributions of Bernstein’s sociology to education development research
Global and national agendas to improve the ‘quality’ of Education For All have brought focus to pedagogic processes in developing country contexts. How can development research pay attention to the social and political significance of pedagogical projects and understand the micro-processes of classroom reform? This paper considers how Basil Bernstein’s sociological theories helped develop a nuanced account of pedagogic reform in a study of Indian…
The Social Contract and India's Right to Education
India's 2009 Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education (RTE) Act presents an idealized social contract which assigns roles to multiple actors to uphold a mutual duty, or collective responsibility, to secure children's access to a quality school education. This article explores how the social contract assumed by the RTE Act misrepresents the conditions required to enact mutual responsibilities as well as actors' agreement to do so. Qualit…
Cosmopolitanism: Religion and kinship among young people in south-western Sydney
Debates about globalization have been accompanied by considerable critical assessment of the notion of cosmopolitanism. The upsurge in travel, trade, communication, and resettlement among non-elite individuals and groups has raised questions about the nature and form of 'bottom-up' or 'vernacular' cosmopolitanism. This article explores the ways in which the experiences of a group of young people (12-15 years of age) in south-western Sydney contri…
Target-driven reforms: Education for All and the translations of equity and inclusion in India
This paper critically examines the ways in which inclusion and equity are constituted through education development policies in India. Programmes implemented under global and national Education for All (EFA) policies have largely involved the quantification of ‘equity’ whereby schooling processes are measured against broad targets for school outcomes – focused mainly on student attendance, retention and academic achievement. Drawing on perspectiv…
Organised abandonment in education
On justice and education: A conversation with Edward Said’s work
This conversational piece is part of the Special Issue Edward Said: Unsettling Education in a Fragmented World. It takes inspiration from Said's many forms of public engagement and puts some of his ideas about justice into dialogue with complex issues facing the field of education: imperialism, nationalism and contrapuntal histories of radical humanism, resistance and redress. We reflect on how Said's critical scholarship may challenge and suppor…
Child-centred education and the promise of democratic learning: Pedagogic messages in rural Indian primary schools
Joyful Learning’ in rural Indian primary schools: An analysis of social control in the context of child‐centred discourses
Efforts to improve the ‘quality’ of education for all in government primary schools in India have seen a shift towards child‐centred teaching. This paper examines the ‘Joyful Learning’ programme, an example of a pedagogic reform implemented in rural primary schools in the southern Indian state of Karnataka. Through an empirical analysis of teachers’ pedagogic discourses, I explore what it means to introduce child‐centred pedagogic principles in l…
Global frameworks, local contingencies: Policy translations and education development in India
Policies and programmes pursuing the universalisation of elementary education (UEE) in developing nations have been influenced by a set of complex forces in international, state, and local arenas. This paper explores how a large‐scale standardised assessment programme shaped by international and market‐oriented discourses has been differently re‐worked in the south Indian state of Karnataka. We draw on observation and interview data with educator…
The contributions of Bernstein’s sociology to education development research
Global and national agendas to improve the ‘quality’ of Education For All have brought focus to pedagogic processes in developing country contexts. How can development research pay attention to the social and political significance of pedagogical projects and understand the micro-processes of classroom reform? This paper considers how Basil Bernstein’s sociological theories helped develop a nuanced account of pedagogic reform in a study of Indian…
Target-driven reforms: Education for All and the translations of equity and inclusion in India
This paper critically examines the ways in which inclusion and equity are constituted through education development policies in India. Programmes implemented under global and national Education for All (EFA) policies have largely involved the quantification of ‘equity’ whereby schooling processes are measured against broad targets for school outcomes – focused mainly on student attendance, retention and academic achievement. Drawing on perspectiv…
New learner subjects? Reforming the rural child for a modern India
This article discusses findings from an ethnographic study of schooling in India to reflect on the ways in which new learner subjects – the ideal citizens of the future – are constructed by education reforms in poor, rural communities. The concerns of the article are framed by the significant economic growth and social modernisation occurring in India, particularly for the expanding urban middle classes. The rural poor have been largely excluded …
Cosmopolitanism: Religion and kinship among young people in south-western Sydney
Debates about globalization have been accompanied by considerable critical assessment of the notion of cosmopolitanism. The upsurge in travel, trade, communication, and resettlement among non-elite individuals and groups has raised questions about the nature and form of 'bottom-up' or 'vernacular' cosmopolitanism. This article explores the ways in which the experiences of a group of young people (12-15 years of age) in south-western Sydney contri…
The 'Poor Child'
The 'poor child' at the centre of development activity is often measured against and reformed towards an idealised and globalised child subject. This book examines why such normative discourses of childhood are in need of radical revision and explores how development research and practice can work to 'unsettle' the global child. It engages the cultural politics of childhood - a politics of equality, identity and representation - as a methodologic…
Chaplaincies in a “Post-Secular” Multicultural University
As universities in Australia are faced with a growth in diversity and intensity of religion and spirituality on campus, this article explores the work of chaplains and its reception by students on a multi-campus suburban university. It finds that the religious work of these professionals is not the primary emphasis in the university context; what is of greater significance to students and the university institution is the broader pastoral and wel…
Reflexivity and the politics of knowledge: Researchers as ‘brokers’ and ‘translators’ of educational development
This paper interrogates the ways in which ‘reflexivity’ has proliferated as a normative methodological discourse in the field of international and comparative education. We argue that the dominant approach to reflexivity foregrounds the standpoints of researchers and their subjects in a way that does not attend to the situated, contingent, and relational dynamics of ‘knowing’ itself. This too easily bypasses the performative effects of research; …
Bernstein revisited: The recontextualisation of equity in contemporary Australian school education
This article draws on the sociology of Basil Bernstein to show how his detailed theories of ‘recontextualisation’ and the ‘pedagogic device’ provide useful analytic levers to examine the politics of educational change. We focus on recent policy developments that have significantly impacted Australian school education: the Program for International Student Assessment; the National Assessment Programme for Numeracy and Literacy; and the government’…
Toward a Postcolonial Comparative and International Education
This article, which serves to introduce the special issue on "Contesting Coloniality: Rethinking Knowledge Production and Circulation in Comparative and International Education," brings to the fore the rarely acknowledged colonial entanglements of knowledge in the field of comparative and international education (CIE). We begin by showing how colonial logics underpin the scholarship of one of the field's founding figures, Isaac L. Kandel. These l…
Visible pedagogic work: Parenting, private tutoring and educational advantage in Australia
This article explores parents’ use of private tutoring services for their primary school children in Sydney, Australia's largest city. Using Bernstein's theories of invisible and visible pedagogies, we look, through the eyes of a small group of middle-class Chinese-background interviewees, at the tensions between certain pedagogic forms associated with private tutoring and schooling in contemporary contexts of educational competition. We show how…
Twenty-five years of International Studies in Sociology of Education: Looking ahead
International perspectives on social inequalities, excellence and aspiration in education
The travels and challenges of theory and practice in education
One of the driving aims of International Studies in Sociology of Education is to foster a scholarly space in which new thinking on educational theory and practice can be presented, debated and adva
The uses of equality in an elite school in India: Enterprise and merit
This article examines the different uses of equality in one elite international school in India. We focus on how conceptions of equality can be enrolled into particular scripts of benevolence and gifting through which elite distinctions are constituted and enacted. Our analysis of interviews with students, teachers and parents in the school highlights three dominant and interrelated uses of equality that are examined with respect to entrepreneuri…
Race and legitimacy: Historical formations of academically selective schooling in Australia
A growing body of research has examined the academic success of ‘Asian’ diaspora students in North America, the UK, and Australia, much of it positioning ‘culture’ as a central analytic concern. Taking the category ‘Asian’ as a concept formed through the imagination and reduction of geopolitical and cultural histories, this article addresses the phenomenon of Asian educational success as it is constituted historically and politically rather than …
The Politics of Post-Qualitative Inquiry: History and Power
In this article, we offer a critical reading of the increasingly popular "post-qualitative" approach to research. We draw on insights from postcolonial theory to offer some provocations about the methodological and conceptual claims made by post-qualitative inquiry. The article considers how post-qualitative inquiry opens up possibilities for post-humanist social research. But, our critical reading of these "new" approaches argues that such resea…
Knowledge and racial violence: The shine and shadow of ‘powerful knowledge’
This paper offers a critique of ‘powerful knowledge’ – a concept in Education Studies that has been presented as a just basis for school curricula. Powerful knowledge is disciplinary knowledge produced and refined through a process of ‘specialisation’ that usually occurs in universities. Drawing on postcolonial, decolonial and Indigenous studies, we show how powerful knowledge seems to focus on the progressive impulse of modernity (its ‘shine’) w…
What does it mean to work in education today? Professional learning, doing and being
The first three articles in this open issue of International Studies in Sociology of Education foreground constantly evolving professional roles in the shifting sands of education, from early years
Migration and the borders of education
Borders matter. Borders, such as those that act as the demarcation of nation states, are routinely reinforced symbolically and materially. Trump’s infamous wall, Australia’s offshore detention cent
Understanding cultural dissonance and the development of social identities
In this first open issue of volume 27 for 2018, we have selected a complementary set of papers that together foreground debates around the construction of social identities and experiences of cultu
The governance of families in India: Education, rights and responsibility
This paper examines the shifting relations between the family and the state in Indian education policy. It charts how family resources, responsibility, and participation have been variously called upon by the state across three historical conjunctures of education reform: the decades of post-independence planning for school expansion and nation-building after 1947; the global development era of economic liberalisation and decentralisation in the …
Disruptive knowledge: Sociologies of educational spaces and processes
Sociology (38 works) · Global Educational Policies and Reforms (33 works) · Political science (32 works) · Global Education and Multiculturalism (21 works) · Law (20 works) · Politics (20 works) · Pedagogy (19 works) · Economics (15 works) · Social science (15 works) · Epistemology (13 works)