Pedagogy 2025

Abstract

My recently completed PhD interrogates dominant narratives in education discourse which frame girls’ education as the vehicle of progress. Decentring these narratives requires the necessary privileging of the voices and experiences of marginalised girls who are otherwise silenced in this discourse. This was attempted in my doctoral fieldwork through a ‘Participatory Action Research’ (PAR) which resisted extractive research methods and highlighted my participants as knowledge producers rather than passive research subjects. Given its commitment to collaboration, democratic knowledge production, and epistemic justice, PAR appeared to be the best methodology to undertake research that aimed to challenge dominant modes of thinking about girls’ education and hoped to discursively challenge the boundaries of who could produce knowledge in academia. Using PAR in my fieldwork centred the voices of marginalised rural girls in India and enabled them to bring their unique perspectives and cultural capital accrued by being located on the margins of intersecting systems of power, in a collaborative effort to produce knowledge about girlhood, education, development, and progress. Opting for such an unconventional (but not unheard of) methodology for a PhD raised several ethical questions as well as practical challenges during fieldwork. This paper, drawing from my doctoral thesis, shares these through an ethnographic analysis of my PAR fieldwork. While acknowledging the tensions between a PhD and participatory research, I also hope to highlight its emancipatory potential and ethical responsibility, exploring how it can serve a transformative purpose in making academia less individual-centric and more democratic.