Deborah

About Me

I am a researcher working at the interface between environmental education, urban studies and cognitive psychology, with a focus on community-practice based approaches such as urban farming. Looking back at my family’s constant migration across Indian cities in search of livelihood and education, I think my innate desire to belong to a place drew me to explore one’s connections with land more closely. By virtue of living in rather small rented houses for a good part of my childhood, I spent most of my time sitting on kitchens counters, soaking in the aromas and stories of various recipes of Bangla cuisine. My mother would often complain regarding the unavailability of certain food items in the markets and would eagerly wait for friends or relatives to bring some sought after vegetable or spice when they would be returning from our native place. Growing up, I was intuitively aware of the complexities surrounding one’s sense of identity as my ‘native’ continued to get pushed back into hazy memories, with newer migrations and travel creating different layers of being. These ideas continued to grow as I was exposed to questions in environmental philosophy speaking of a fundamental disconnect with land as the root cause of ecologically damaging behaviour at individual and collective level. But, whose land? Which people? To what ends? These questions have continue to motivate much of my research and teaching as an educator. 

Motivation for Participating in Manthan

I got interested in the project owing to its explicit commitment to widen the discourse on education and pedagogy, especially incorporating critical perspectives emerging from the work in non-western contexts and theories. As a researcher based in India, this was a meaningful step in the direction of illustrating the spectrum of work happening here, through drawing upon ways in which the intersectionalities of caste, class, gender, religion, and socio-ecological realities offer a complex educational landscape. How do educators negotiate these tensions while trying to support critical perspectives? What is the role of different formal and non-formal institutions in maintaining or challenging dominant discourses? How do practitioners sustain their personal visions of social transformation in the face of a rapidly changing socio-political climate? In a time where a singular narrative threatens to silence plurality of experiences, I felt this project offers a glimmer of hope through acknowledging and respecting the diversity of voices that constitute the vibrant social histories in India. 

Email: debbiebornfree@gmail.com

Gayithri

About Me

There are so many ways I identify myself, like everybody else. To start with, I am an international scholar/researcher, born and raised in Bangalore, India, but currently working as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Oregon, Eugene, in the United States. Though my disciplinary home is computing education, within that, I work towards integrating the social, cultural, and political dimensions of computing. I strive to bring to the fore the implications of technical solutions on marginalised individuals, communities, and societies. I primarily work with high school teachers to realise this vision of critical computing education within their classrooms, curricular materials, and teacher preparation efforts. 

My grandfather and father, who modelled what it means to be critical and never let me settle for simplistic explanations of anything, inspire most of my work. They taught me to question the caste system, orthodoxy, gender roles, institutional domination, and exploitation, to mention a few. I carry forward a similar commitment to asking harder questions to deepen my relationships—personally as a daughter, sister, cousin, wife, daughter-in-law, and aunt, and professionally as an emerging scholar, a mentee, and a mentor. 

Motivation for Participating in Manthan

The shift in the social, cultural, and political context when I moved to the US for the graduate program in 2015 made me question a lot of what I saw. Why are we reading papers and scholarships mainly from the US or EU countries? Why did I even choose to come to the US to pursue my graduate studies? Stories of patriarchy, even when discussed in classes, sounded very different and distanced from my personal experiences. Issues of caste and religious discrimination that I witnessed (not experienced) growing up as a female in a semi-orthodox Brahmin family were barely taken up in class materials or ensuing discussions. In these questions and observations was also a struggle to find my place as an educational researcher from India or the “global south.” As I searched for answers to some of these questions, the contextual nature of educational endeavours—the kind of questions we ask, the theories that guide us, our perspectives of and expectations from research and its connections to societies, and the resources we have at our disposal—became apparent. I started seeking and learning so much from Black feminist scholars, indigenous scholars, and dalit writers and activists. I soon realised that I need to decenter the western gaze and lenses and instead hear from the voices embedded in the context if I have to further understand the sociocultural and sociopolitical factors that shape education in India, which I most intimately have experiences of. Voices from the margins in the US and how they led their communities towards uncovering similar complexities shaping their children’s education inspired me to dream up this project with my friends Suraj and Vishesh, whom Deborah soon joined!

Email: gayithri@uoregon.edu

About Me

Professionally, I position myself as a learning scientist, qualitative methodologist, and critical equity-oriented scholar. My work takes up sociocultural and political theories of learning, and focuses on learning as a process of social change. For example, in the past I have partnered with LGBTQ+ youth activists as they tried to make their schools more inclusive–and explored what and how the youth learned in the process. Outside of work, I am an activist and writer. I love to read, especially sci-fi/fantasy, young adult, and graphic novels. I watch a lot of TV, particularly comedy. And I love to cook. 

Motivation for Participating in Manthan

I grew up in the United States. In doing so, I became increasingly uncomfortable with limited (and therefore homogenising) mainstream narratives of Indian people in politics, arts, and US culture broadly. Politically, some prominent Indian American politicians were quick to position themselves as separate from racism in the United states, from neutral observers to ‘model minorities’ that disproved the existence of systemic racism. Over time I noticed that these narratives allowed Indian Americans’ experiences to be used as a cudgel against racial justice movements, particularly those led by Black, Latinx, and Indigenous people, by homogenising them. I came to realise that there is enormous diversity even among Indians in the United States–and that to talk about “the Indian diaspora” meaningfully would require a deeper understanding of things like caste, indigeneity, religion, politics in South Asia, and colonialism. At the same time, artistic depictions of Indian Americans tended to boil down culture to its most visible elements (and these too from only dominant sub-cultures) – food, religion, ceremonies, languages – which are important, but omit harder to capture the invisible dimensions, like the cultural nature of the advice my family gives me. My family is Sindhi, and left Sindh (in modern Pakistan) in the events around Partition. Thus, I feel a natural curiosity about this period of history and its repercussions. These experiences positioned me as wanting to better understand diverse Indian cultures, and, perhaps more importantly, to do so in a way that resisted homogenising and universalising such a large region (especially in a way that erased differences that matter for pursuing social justice). 

I grew as a learning scientist to sharpen my commitment to equity and justice, both in and through the study of learning. This specific focus on learning and education seemed a productive constraint for beginning this exploration, especially alongside my collaborators who had had different experiences as Indians. Over the course of this project, I have become increasingly aware of how US-based scholars doing work outside the US must be intentional in not reifying US hegemony or erasing important nuances. Throughout the doing of this project, I therefore was–and remain–generatively unsure if I was the “right person” to participate in the crafting of these projects. However, I also am weary of using one’s positionality as a way to “opt out” of learning anything further. While of course our/my perspective shaped who was interviewed and what was asked, ultimately this project–for me–focused on learning from and with those who sat for discussion with us.

Email: suttamchandani@adelphi.edu

Vishesh

About Me

I engage in learning science research aimed at understanding how to design tools, technologies, and spaces for richer varieties of collaboration to take place. My work involves designing games and tools to be used across classrooms as well as informal environments centering creativity, agency, and rich social learning opportunities. I am most interested in expanding access to learning socially in richly diverse manners – in terms of disciplinary silos as well as the ability to engage in different modalities of collaboration. 

I believe this perspective comes from the centrality of social value, belonging, and connections in what I have pursued learning and doing, and how I have been able to learn to do things. In these social pursuits, I have noticed my connections with different people often becomes the underlying fabric for that relationship as well as the ideas and practices I learn from the same. I use this as a compass for my personal community building as well as how I think about the design of collaborative learning environments in my work.

In pursuing this project (from its inception to its completion), I have grown in my understanding about critical issues of caste, gender, sexual orientation, and disability in India. I have valued how my understanding of and relationship to these issues (especially as belonging to dominant groups across these categories) evolved through reading broad analyses, works from specific people, and then conversations with the same people often having lived experiences of these issues.

Motivation for Participating in Manthan

Through my graduate education in the United States, there was a noticeable centering of American perspectives in who was studied as learners, as well as who did the studying (in the rare case that research was conducted outside the United States). 

While my curriculum itself did not provide me the tools to articulate this shortcoming, gathering as a social collective of the influx of Indian graduate students in the Learning Sciences, we were able to initiate conversations that surfaced for me how perspectives from our cultural backgrounds can inform and create a different learning science(s) from the one we currently study and have access to. This vision of helping expand what the learning sciences looks like as a field of study, design, and theory development – by being deeply influenced by perspectives that have been ignored so far – was key in my excitement about Manthan.

Email: visheshkay@gmail.com