Ep. 29 Understanding Rural Lives and Livelihoods: Young People's Engagements with Education and Work in India [Part-I]

This podcast features a conversation with Dr Peggy Froerer (Reader, Anthropology) and Dr Gunjan Wadhwa (ESRC Postdoctoral Fellow, Education), Brunel University London. It discusses Dr Froerer's work with the historically marginalised Adivasi communities in rural parts of Central India (Chhattisgarh) with a particular focus on young people's engagements with education and its entanglements with work and livelihoods. Dr Froerer critically highlights the continuities and tensions between the global discourses of development and modernity and the local lived realities of the Adivasis, and the impacts of this on young people's aspirations. The conversation brings out the methodological and theoretical challenges of doing research in rural contexts, working with marginalised social groups and undoing the dominant frameworks. Dr Froerer emphasises paying attention to the context to understand intersections of religion, ethnicity and gender in relation to her work, along with the work of the state in the current socio-political conditions.​

Dr Peggy Froerer is Reader in Anthropology at Brunel University London and author of Religious Division and Social Conflict. She is currently working on her second book, which considers how marginalized young people’s differentiated engagement with school education articulates with their livelihood options and aspirations for a better future. Peggy is also co-Investigator on a collaborative, multi-regional research project (ESRC-DfID, 2016-2018) which examines education systems, aspiration and learning outcomes in remote rural areas of India, Lesotho and Laos. She has directed an ethnographic film (Village Lives, Distant Powers; produced by Margaret Dickinson), which is based on her research on development, the state and corruption in central India.

Dr Gunjan Wadhwa is an Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Education at Brunel University London on 'Rural youth identities in India'. Her research troubles the dominant discursive strains that produce the post-colonial nation-state and citizen, and through this position marginalised groups like the Adivasis and rural youth in opposition to ideas of the ‘modern’. Gunjan's recent publications include Ethics of Positionality in Capturing Adivasi Youth ‘Voices’ in a Village Community in India (Ethics and Integrity in Research with Children and Young People, 2021) and (Un)Doing Rights: Adivasi participation in governance discourses in an area of civil unrest in India (The International Journal of Human Rights, 25:7, 2021).

Edited by Yashita Jain

Music: Little Idea by Scott Holmes (scottholmesmusic.com) / CC BY-NC