Adivasi neighbourhood and its‘ school
A critical ethnography of aspirations and contours of marginalisation in Kerala
Keywords:
Neighbourhood Schooling, Ethnography, Marginalisation, AdivasiAbstract
This paper looks into the school-neighbourhood interactions in one of the adivasi dominant villages in Kerala. It explores how the educational aspirations of advasi community are placed in the local development discourse. A brief review of the neighbourhood–school relationship,especially in the context of existing social inequality, is explored in the introduction. Then thepaper is divided into two parts. The first part of the essay focuses on the historical experience of marginalisation in the regional mainstream and the local imaginations of advasi development. The second part focuses on how the school has historically evolved within this regional mainstream and how it responds to the educational aspirations of advasis. This essay tries to understand how the experience of marginality is created and sustained in adivasi neighbourhoods that are sandwiched in the regional mainstream in Kerala? How adivasi communities articulate. their educational aspirations? And how the school in the neighbourhood responds to these aspirations? The empirical observations of the paper are gathered through a year long fieldwork conducted in 2014 and a revisit conducted in 2019.