Journal Issue: Education and Violence
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2015-29-05
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Education and Violence: Editor’s Introduction
Sandler, Jennifer
Stuck in the middle with you: the political position of teachers during the Algerian War of Independence
Artaud de La Ferriere, Alexis
Teachers stand out amongst civil servants by virtue of their embedded position within governed communities, their moral authority within those communities, and the relative autonomy of their work. This paper investigates the political position of teachers in Algeria during the War of Independence from France (1954-62). Although teachers were agents of the French state, and active in facilitating French governance in Algeria, they were regarded with deep suspicion by the French security services, and subjected to a sustained surveillance and repression campaign from the very first months of the war. Teachers were caught in a no-man’s land between the French State, which employed them, and the nascent Algerian nation, whose children they cared for in the classroom. Based on oral history interviews with former teachers, the study of recently declassified public archives in France and Algeria, and a critical engagement with educational research on teachers working in disenfranchised communities, this paper investigates the difficult, and often dangerous, position teachers found themselves in as a result of the war. We examine the routine military incursions into schools by the French army, arrests and assaults of teachers, and how teachers sought to balance their duties of service to education with their political resistance to colonialism. However, we also recognise the heterogeneity of the teaching corps, and the relevance of this factor regarding relations between teachers and members of the armed forces. The data collected for this study indicates strong disparities in the campaign against teachers, depending on region, the teacher’s ethnicity, and on the type of school they worked in. Finally, we use this research as a case study to discuss the tensions which can arise between the right and the left hands of state within a situation of armed conflict.
“Boys Must Be Beaten”: Corporal Punishment, Gender, and Age in New Delhi Schools
Proctor, Lavanya Murali
In this article I discuss the relationship between corporal punishment and gender in two public schools in New Delhi. Women teachers beat male students, justifying it as the only way to get “respect” from them and as a way of maintaining “obedience” and “control.” They emphasized that male teachers did not need to hit male students, as these teachers were respected simply because they were men. Both students and teachers agreed that “boys needed beating,” but that girls were inherently obedient and should not be hit. Drawing on scholarly literature, news sources, and observation of and interviews with teachers, students, and parents, I show how corporal punishment in schools is not simply punishment for in-school wrongdoing. Rather, corporal punishment demonstrates how ideologies of femininity, masculinity, age, and power are constituted through everyday, normalized violence against youth, and reinforced through the school system.
Studying Policy Through Violence: The social conditions of education reform in Mexico
Sherry, Ashley E
This paper explores current Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto’s 2013 public education reform through ethnographic engagement, archival research, and interviews in Mexico City and Guerrero, Mexico. By May 2013, the National Coordination of Education Workers’ (CNTE)—the primary education reform opposition movement—had gained national traction and more than 40,000 educators from various states indefinitely relocated to Mexico City’s zocalo. In this paper, the author presents an account of the social conditions of policy formation and experiences of violence in the lives of teachers, legislators, political advisors, students, and community members, engaged in shaping education and opposing the reform. An anthropological approach to policy and violence embraces the analytical horizons of a world that prompts us to consider such large-scale phenomena as economic crises, neoliberal policies, and forced disappearances. A focus on dispersed communities allowed the author to explore the ways in which people engage, change, and experience the violence of policy across fluid borders, instead of how policy impacts presumably bounded communities. This Paper was awarded the "Society for Urban National and Transnational/global Anthropology graduate student paper" prize in 2014.
The impact of media representations on Somali youth's experiences in educational spaces
Fellin, Melissa
In this article, I examine how the politics of representation following September 11, 2001 attacks on the US impact the experiences of Somali youth in educational spaces in North America. This research draws from a discourse analysis of representations of Somalis and Somalia in North American newspaper articles (n=82) between August and October 2011 and 51 interviews with Somali youth between the ages of 14 and 30. It also draws from ethnographic fieldwork for 16 months (July 2010−October 2011) in Kitchener-Waterloo and Toronto, Canada and Minneapolis-St. Paul, USA. This includes participant-observation at Somali youth events, organizations, centres, homework programs, mosques and after-school and weekend Islamic schools that provide spaces of learning for Somali youth outside of public/private schools. In this article, I argue that the representations of Somalis in the media as either perpetrators or victims of violence are gendered and have variously politicized Somali men and women within the current ‘War on Terror.’ As a result, Somali youth are targets of routine forms of structural violence, expressed in discrimination and marginalization as well as interpersonal forms of violence, including bullying. I examine how these forms of violence are both carried out and resisted in educational spaces and how they variously affect Somali youth’s experiences in school. The article shows how Somali community educational spaces provide spaces of belonging and a space to learn the skills needed to challenge representations of Somalis and Somalia in the media. Somali youths’ experiences of violence and within educational spaces reshape their identities.