Education as a modern state-led project is a highly contested field that can give students of postcolonial states and societies insights into questions of nation-building, citizens-making and state developmentalism. The course will engage with the relationship between education and nation-building in Pakistan’s postcolonial history, in particular as situated in the context of modernization discourses and the political economy of the Cold War years. It will approach this question through themes of Islam and nation, science and “national needs” (Roy 2007), class and (im)mobility, “national culture” and its other(s), the ideal citizen, nationalizing history and the gendered nation.
The course will trace the discursive and institutional lineages of the education system in Pakistan from the colonial into the postcolonial phase along with the transformation of (Muslim) nationalist discourse on education into a state-project of nation-building. It will engage with both state-led project of national education and its postcolonial trajectory across political regimes as well as its contestation within state discourse and in various spaces of social and political life. The course takes education as a field where ideologies and visions of nation and citizenship are contested by state and society.
The course will require students to engage with secondary as well as primary material.
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