ABSTRACT
Exploring the agential role of education, the authors of this chapter position themselves as outsiders but, in their chapter, set out to examine success stories of Indian women who have negotiated the unequal spaces of knowing and knowledge production to create an enabling space for themselves. This chapter highlights ways in which the subjects of the study, four young Indian women who have been challenged educationally not only by gender but also by social, economic and geographical locations in India manage to emerge as educational success stories in the US. The case studies clearly show how the same set of spaces and spatial practices can be enabling and constraining at the same time but at different scales. The chapter examines the traditional separation of home (women) and work (men) spaces by gender and the school space as a link between the two. Inherent in this discussion is an examination of patriarchally derived spatial boundaries which may hinder or prevent the mobility of girls and women in a very real physical sense as well as in the social sense. The resulting analysis furthers the understanding of how social spaces can positively impact girls’ education in India – allowing scope for a scripting or re-scripting of gender in ways that can be empowering, at least at the level of the individual if not collectively.
