Yamini Agarwal is a sociologist of education and works under MWF’s focus area Education and Learning. She received her doctorate from Jawaharlal Nehru University in 2020. Yamini joined MWF in 2018 as a Research Assistant and coordinator of the project Education and the Urban in India. She also edited the Working Papers Series of the project. As a Fellow since 2022, Yamini worked on a project titled ‘Gender, Education, and Covid-19: Impact of the Pandemic in a Marginalized Neighbourhood in Delhi’. The project culminated in 2023, with a workshop held in Delhi followed with the publication of a special journal issue in 2025. She was awarded the Charles Wallace India Trust Fellowship (2017), ICSSR Fellowship for Data Collection Abroad (2018) and was a visiting Fellow Weizenbaum Institute in Berlin in 2023. Yamini has published in Comparative Education Studies, British Journal of Religious Education, Sikh Formations and Contemporary Education Dialogue and contributed to several edited volumes. She taught sociology at Netaji Subhas University of Technology, Delhi from 2019-2021. Yamini also previously worked with The Indian Express and The Pioneer as a copy editor.
Areas of Research Interest
- Educational inequality
- Qualitative methods
- Ethnography
- Urban marginality
- Education of religious minorities
- Education markets
Ongoing Research Project
Religious Identity and Schooling: An Ethnography of Sikh Education in Contemporary India
This ethnographic monograph examines the role of Sikh minority schools in shaping students’ religious and cultural identities and future pathways. It is about the disjuncture between schooling practices and the lived experiences of Sikhism in schools. The book highlights the many ways of being a Sikh from the perspective of the students in these institutions. Through ethnographic fieldwork, I show the multiple ways in which students learn and negotiate their religious identity in schools and construct their future life chances. I further study the experiences of Hindu and Muslim students in these schools, with the former forming the numerical majority in both the institutions despite their minority character. In focusing on the experiences of these students with the schools’ norms and pedagogy around Sikhism, I examine how education becomes the site for myriad negotiations towards shaping their future life chances. The project provides an alternative understanding of minority educational institutions and the many paradoxes that surround the lives of students from different religious backgrounds in them. It further provides a critical perspective on myriad structures of power that operate in such institutions and on students’ agency and the ideas of community, identity and belongingness that emerge from their subjectivities.
Completed Research Project
Gender, Education, and Covid-19: Impact of the Pandemic in a Marginalized Neighbourhood in Delhi
Started in 2021, this longitudinal study explored the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic, the subsequent lockdown of schools and shrinking of educational opportunities on the lives of girls in an unauthorised neighbourhood in Delhi. The ethnographic study centralised the location of the participants in this neighbourhood of nearly 1.5 million people which only has one senior secondary school. Given the preexisting precarities for these girls even before the pandemic, the project argued that the creation of new markets in education during and after covid-19 and the many gendered dimensions of education of girls in India and in neighbourhoods where educational opportunities were limited to begin with severed their life chances. The study examined the new structures of exclusion that were created for these girls and others amid shrinking role of public education that eventually led them to dropout out of schools or negotiate for opportunities in an already unequal educational system. A workshop titled ‘Pandemic and Education: Contexts of Rupture, Change and Possibilities’ was held in Delhi as part of the project in 2023 with scholars whose ethnographic and empirical works show the manifold impacts of the pandemic on education from different regions in India. A few papers from this workshop were published in 2025 as part of a special journal edition with Comparative Education Studies.
I presented findings from this study at various national and international conferences including at University of Regensburg, University of Trier and GHI-London. In 2023, I was awarded a two-month visiting fellowship at Weizenbaum Institute in Berlin to study the growth of digital educational markets in India following the pandemic. I am further exploring the various facets of these digital education markets with focus on educational inequality to develop as a project study.
Publications
Agarwal, Yamini. 2025. Review of the book Between Nation and ‘Community’: Muslim Universities and Indian Politics after Partition by Laurence Gautier, Social Change, forthcoming. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/00490857251382776.
Agarwal, Yamini. 2025. Urban Marginalisation, Exclusion and Education: The Widows’ Colony in Delhi. In, Shifting Landscapes: Education and Urban Transformations in India, edited by Geetha B. Nambissan, Nandini Manjrekar, Indra Sengupta and Shivali Tukdeo, pp. 302-324. Cambridge University Press: United Kingdom. ISBN 9781009596886, DoI: 10.1017/9781009596886.
Agarwal, Yamini. 2025. ‘This is not what I thought my life would be’: Impact of the Pandemic on Girls’ Education in an Unauthorised Neighbourhood in Delhi, Comparative Education Studies, Vol. 2 (1), pp. 35-61. https://journal.cesindia.net/this-is-not-what-i-thought-my-life-would-be-impact-of-the-covid-19-pandemic-on-girls-education-in-an-unauthorised-colony-in-delhi/.
Agarwal, Yamini. 2025. Editorial, Deepening Fault Lines and New Precarities in Education After the COVID-19 Pandemic(Special Issue), Comparative Education Studies, Vol. 2 (1), pp. 3-8. https://journal.cesindia.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/CES.Vol_2.1_Guest-Editorial_Agarwal.pdf.
Agarwal, Yamini. 2024. Review of the book The School at Ajmeri Gate: Delhi’s Educational Legacy by Azra Razzack & M. Atyab Siddiqui, Social Change, 54(1): 141-143, https://doi.org/10.1177/00490857231221221.
Agarwal, Yamini. 2023. ‘Sikh Educational Institutions in India’, in Pashaura Singh and Arvind Pal Singh-Mandair (eds), The Sikh World. Routledge: Oxon/New York. ISBN 9781138317123, https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429455322.
Agarwal, Yamini. 2023. Review of the book Educating Youth: Regulation through Psychosocial Skilling in India by R. Maithreyi, Contemporary Education Dialogue, 20(1): 157-162. https://doi.org/10.1177/0973184922114.
Agarwal, Yamini. 2022. ‘The Making of Sikh Student: Ethnographic Study of a Minority School in Delhi’, British Journal of Religious Education, 45(1): 69-81. https://doi.org/10.1080/01416200.2022.2092069.
Agarwal, Yamini. 2020. Urban Marginalisation, Exclusion and Education: The Widows’ Colony in Delhi, Working Paper No. 7, Education and the Urban in India, Max Weber Stiftung-GHI London. https://doi.org/10.25360/01-2020-00034.
Agarwal, Yamini. 2020. ‘Teaching Identity in Schools: Learning to be Sikh in India’, Sikh Formations: Religion, Culture, Theory, 16(4): 423-440. https://doi.org/10.1080/17448727.2020.1741183.
Agarwal, Yamini. 2020. Doctoral Thesis Announcement, British Journal of Sociology of Education, 42(1): 145. https://doi.org/10.1080/01425692.2020.1847458.
Agarwal, Yamini. 2020. “‘Is this home? Not so much!’ – Gender, Ethnicity and Belongingness to the City”, German Historical Institute London Blog, 19 November. Available at https://ghil.hypotheses.org/218.
Agarwal, Yamini. 2017. ‘Educational Aspirations of Survivors of the 1984 Anti-Sikh Violence in Delhi’, Contemporary Education Dialogue, 14(2): 166-186. https://doi.org/10.1177/0973184917716994.

