Author : Jennifer Otting
Release : 2022
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Kind : eBook
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Book Synopsis Promises and Paradoxes by : Jennifer Otting

Download or read book Promises and Paradoxes written by Jennifer Otting. This book was released on 2022. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this global moment, the rise of fascist styles of governments have sounded alarms to the demise of democracy. As concerns of democracy intensify, education's role in creating the democratically minded citizen also intensifies. "Promises and Paradoxes: Democracy and Higher Education in Burma" examines the relationship between democracy and education during the democratic opening in Burma. Specifically, I look at how the idea of democracy was constructed within higher educational spaces and how the discursive construction of democracy shaped the practices transforming higher education. Burma's pro-democracy educational agenda was situated within development initiatives framed around solving Burma's fragility conditions and within new market-based practices. This study brings together, democracy, higher education and fragility using the theoretical and methodological frameworks of Foucault's archeological approach and Laclau and Mouffe's discourse theory to understand the paradoxes created through the discursive linkages of democracy, education and fragility. My year-long, 2018-2019 multi-sited ethnographic study of public, non-profit and for-profit higher education institutions focused on three questions: 1). how pedagogical practices associated with democratic behaviors were articulated within policy documents and HE spaces enabling a particular understanding of democracy to emerge; 2). how the idea of freedom became a central discursive feature of Burma's democracy and how this iteration of democracy transformed the landscape and lifeworld of HE; 3). how the pursuit of individual freedom, embedded in Burma's notion of democracy, shaped the subjectivity of students for the purpose of transforming state's fragile conditions. Reformers believed that the practices and pedagogies associated with democracy would increase students' knowledge and skills, enhance personal freedom and produce a more stable society needed to help the country leave its state of fragility. In ethnographic detail, my research showed how the enactment of educational practices associated with democracy worked against their perceived intention. Implementing the learner-centered pedagogical (LCP) approach and critical thinking, envisioned to bolster democracy and strengthen national unity, actually maintained exclusionary belief systems and practices by limiting who could exist and what could be heard. While private education, choice and academic autonomy offered professors and students new decision-making opportunities, this freedom came with new forms of discipline. Academics in both the public and private sectors had to take on increasing workloads and seek out additional training while navigating through more volatility in the job market. At the same time, students learned to analyze themselves and their problems in terms of economic, moral, and political risks, so they could offset future calamity from globalizing processes. Academics and students imagined a life where free choice and personal autonomy in the present provided the pathway for greater freedom in the future. Paradoxically, it was the pursuit of an imagined democratic future that equality, inclusion, and self-liberation in the present was never realized.