EDUCATION IN CONFLICT AND EMERGENCIES

Congratulations to Ruchi Saini who is this year’s recipient of the EiCE SIG Paper Award!

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Ruchi Saini is a doctoral candidate in the International Education Policy Program at the University of Maryland, College Park. Her research interests include gender-based violence (GBV) in South Asia and decolonizing feminist research in conflict-affected contexts. In her current research project, Ruchi makes use of a decolonial feminist framework to analyse female school teachers’ experiences with care work and online teaching during COVID-19 in India. The study draws attention to the complicated forms of agency and resistance exhibited by female school teachers as they navigate the increased care work at home, as well as, the limitation of the agency. It moves beyond an essentializing image of women from the so-called “global south” as victims and/or rebels to instead highlight the messiness, ambiguities, and contradictions of their experiences within emergency contexts.

 

Ruchi’s dissertation explores how female undergraduate students at a public college in Delhi (India) conceptualize and respond to the diverse manifestations of gender-based violence (GBV) in their lives. By integrating an intersectional feminist narrative inquiry with the framework of the continuum of violence, the dissertation seeks to provide key insights into the manifestations of GBV that are yet to be named, and how students’ overlapping identities impact their response to it. The findings will hopefully provide researchers and policy makers the language to name the everydayness of GBV experienced by students that is typically not classified as criminal, thus enabling more effective socio-structural responses to address the issue.

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Prior to joining the University of Maryland, Ruchi received her Master’s in Arts (English) from St. Stephen's College at the University of Delhi, and a Master’s in Education from the University of Glasgow, Scotland.