Associate Fellow

Sarada Balagopalan’s work is an attempt to critically theorise the category of Childhood by relating it to discourses of modernity, late capitalism and current transnational efforts to secure “rights” for children. Her doctorate from New York University was an ethnographic study on the literacy experiences of street children in Calcutta, and Sarada’s research utilizes the historically mediated specificity of childhood and children’s experiences in different social contexts to interrogate present efforts to naturalise a particular bourgeois construction of childhood as the ideal. This work on the politics of childhood also informs her broader intellectual interests in education. She is particularly interested in issues of pedagogy and its reliance on universal constructs of childhood, and their effects on the construction of identities amongst first-generation school goers and their communities.

Sarada has been deeply involved in translating these research interests into pedagogic and curricular interventions and has worked with Eklavya for several years on their social studies textbooks and school-based programmes. Currently she acts as the Chief Advisor for NCERT’s middle-school “Social and Political Life” textbooks. Sarada also co-edits Contemporary Education Dialogue, bi-annual inter-disciplinary journal on education in South Asia.

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