Human Rights Education in India: A Multilevel Case Study of Policy, Pedagogy, and Practice

Monisha Bajaj

In the past two decades, the United Nations and over 100 of its member states have officially declared their interest in the promotion of human rights education (HRE) and its incorporation into national curricula. This multilevel case study will examine human rights education in India to determine how differentiated motivations for, conceptualizations of, and initiatives towards HRE operate at the levels of policy, curriculum and pedagogy, and practice. At the local level of practice specifically, this project seeks to examine how caste discrimination is addressed by HRE programs in southern India and the extent to which notions of caste identity are renegotiated by students, teachers, and alumni of such training programs. Caste discrimination has been an entrenched feature of Indian society and intersects with the extreme income disparities among the nation’s one billion residents. While political, economic, and social inclusion of low- and out-caste individuals and communities in the Indian nation-state has been a salient theme for the past six decades since Indian independence, the tacit goal of many HRE initiatives is the orientation towards a global rather than national sense of citizenship. As such, this project explores HRE at multiple levels and will provide important information for scholars, practitioners, and policymakers on the relationship between human rights education, citizenship, and democratic participation.

About Monisha Bajaj

N/A