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The Centre for Policy Research (CPR) and Centre de Sciences Humaines (CSH) invite you to a workshop on:
Channeling Compassion towards Change: Elite Volunteerism, Corporate Philanthropy and Education Reform in Urban India
Speaker:
Dr. Vidya Subramanian, Associate Professor, Jindal School of Government & Public Policy (JSGP)
Tuesday, 28th January 2025, 3:45 PM IST onwards. The event will be held in a hybrid mode at the CPR Conference Room (Dharam Marg, New Delhi) and online over Zoom.
About the Talk
This talk explores how corporate philanthropy is steering Non-Governmental Organisations (NGO) engaged in school education reforms within the larger ambit of Public Private Partnerships (PPP) and governance in post-liberalisation India. It examines these complex dynamics through the trajectories of young elite professionals who volunteered with the corporate-supported transnational education intervention – the Teach for India (TFI) programme across Mumbai and Delhi. The TFI intervention operates as a nodal site for these elite professionals with engineering, commerce, and management educational backgrounds to not just serve underprivileged children through ‘acts of compassion’ but also channel their experiences to understand the education system and reinvigorate it through corporate management values of enterprise and performance. An examination of the pathways of these
individuals foreground the nascent terrain of technocratic expertise being shaped through an interlinked collective of corporate NGOs that have become significant over the past decade in directing policy measures toward improving public education.
About the Speaker
Dr. Vidya Subramanian has an interdisciplinary academic background in Sociology, Education Studies, and Development Studies. Her research focuses on the public-private partnerships in education, entrepreneurship, and governance in post-liberalisation India.
She received her PhD and MPhil from the Zakir Husain Centre for Educational Studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi, during which she was a Doctoral Fellow at the Transnational Research Group (TRG) of the Max Weber Foundation-German Humanities Institutes Abroad. Before joining the Jindal School of Government and Public Policy, she taught at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai, and was a consultant to the Tata Trusts. Dr. Subramanian’s research has been published in the Economic & Political Weekly, Contemporary Education Dialogue, International Studies in Sociology of Education, and Contemporary South Asia.
Find all the available videos of our previous workshops, here.
