Award Information
2021
Institutional Affiliation (at time of award):
PhD Candidate, Education, University of Southern California
Re-enchanting Education: Spirituality and Well-being for Democratic Schooling
This project maps the contemporary interactions in global spiritual landscape to bear upon the equitable and democratic aims of public education. Despite public education’s secular agendas, modern spiritual practices like mindfulness and yoga are being adopted on a large scale in schools across the world. I investigate this phenomenon in the United States and India in terms of- 1) discourses and conditions that legitimize the introduction of spiritual practices for democratic schooling; and 2) pedagogical relations in their practice and its relation to equitable education. I argue that the spiritual and the secular are produced simultaneously as alternatives to religion.