Selected Academic Publications

Single-authored

This ethnographic study of environmental learning in a South African township school unravels how formal education can depoliticise young people’s understandings of environmental decay. Conceptualising environmental learning through Rob Nixon’s notion of ‘slow violence’ and Hannah Arendt’s understanding of ‘action’, the article argues that despite the depoliticization enacted through schooling, individual learners and educators articulate subterranean understandings of the environmental multicrisis rooted in informal learning. This helps us understand the potential of environmental learning outside schools.

  • “Environmental Futures through Children’s Eyes: Slow Observational Participatory Videomaking and Multi-Sited Ethnography,” Visual Anthropology Review 37:2 (2021)

    This article reflects on the lessons learned from a participatory videomaking study with children in India and South Africa. The study used a deliberately “slow” process to learn about children’s imagination of the future in light of environmental crisis. While arguing that this methodology holds promise as a way to co-create knowledge with study participants, the article also raises ethical questions that need to be addressed when this methodology is deployed in the service of specific research agendas.


  • "Politicising ESE in postcolonial settings: the power of historical responsibility, action and ethnography," Environmental Education Research 25:4 (2019)

    This article argues that the mission of Environmental and Sustainability Education (ESE) is inherently political and that, by not acknowledging this, ESE interventions risk becoming part of the problem of sustainability rather than the solution. The article offers a theoretical framework for thinking about the (de)politicising effects of ESE rooted in three key elements: historical responsibility, action and the postcolonial condition. This framework builds on Ricoeur’s phenomenology, Arendt’s theory of action and the work of postcolonial scholars in arguing for a grounded understanding of ESE, which necessitates the use of ethnographic methods in ESE research.


  • "Ethically scaling up interventions in educational development: a case for collaborative multi-sited ethnographic research," Comparative Education 54:3 (2018)

    Educational interventions are often administered at scale in diverse settings as part of international development programmes. Their implementation is subject to a linear process that begins with finding out ‘what works’ at a local level, frequently through the use of randomised controlled trials, and continues with rolling out the intervention to the whole population at a national or even transnational level. This process often fails to consider the role cultural, political, and historical factors play in the perceived success of the local intervention, which can compromise both the impact and the ethics of at-scale implementation. To help address this issue, this paper argues for a definition of scalability that incorporates the ethics of the practice of scaling. It points to the potential of collaborative multi-sited ethnographic research to identify nuanced understandings of the different ethics systems endogenous to individual sites of implementation, in lieu of the universalising notions of ethics that are embedded in mainstream, linear notions of scalability. In so doing, it makes the case for multi-sited critical ethnography as a methodology of choice in researching the scalability of interventions in the context of development projects in the ‘Global South’.


  • "Elitism and its challengers: Educational development ideology in postcolonial India through the prism of film, 1950–1970," International Journal of Educational Development 60 (May 2018)

    This article examines the ideological foundations of state-led educational development in India, as reflected in documentary films produced by the Films Division of India, the institution tasked with spreading the government’s vision for developing India. An analysis of documentaries concerned with educational development made from 1950 to 1970 shows contradictory educational visions that reflect the different understanding various groups of actors within the government had about the role education would play in Indian society. These tensions and contestations echo present-day debates about Indian education and help illuminate the dynamics currently at play in the gap between state rhetoric and the delivery of education in India.


Co-authored