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Dr Yamini Agarwal

Yamini Agarwal is a sociologist of education. She received her doctorate from Jawaharlal Nehru University in 2020. Titled ‘Minority Education, Identity and Opportunity: A Case Study of Two Sikh Schools in Delhi’, her thesis explored the role of religious minority schools in transmitting the normative image of a community, its ideology and culture. She was awarded the Charles Wallace India Trust Fellowship and ICSSR Fellowship for Data Collection Abroad in 2017. Yamini joined MWF-SAS in 2018 as a Research Assistant and project coordinator of the research group Education and the Urban in India. She also edited articles for the Working Papers Series under the project. Yamini has published in British Journal of Religious Education, Sikh Formations and Contemporary Education Dialogue. She has also taught sociology at Netaji Subhas University of Technology, Delhi. Yamini’s areas of interest are educational inequality, gender, markets in education and urban marginality. She has previously worked with The Indian Express and The Pioneer.

Areas of Research Interest

  • Educational inequality
  • Qualitative methods
  • Ethnography
  • Gender
  • Urban marginality
  • Education of religious minorities
  • Education markets

Ongoing Research Project

Gender, Education, and Covid-19: Impact of the Pandemic in a Marginalized Neighbourhood in Delhi

Started in 2021, this longitudinal study explores the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic, the subsequent lockdown of schools and shrinking of educational opportunities on the lives of girls between 14 and 17 years in an unauthorised neighbourhood in Delhi. It is an ethnographic study that centralises 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 argues 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 shows 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. 

Interviews with the participants were conducted between 2021 and 2023. In 2023, a working paper series was conceived under the project, titled ‘Pandemic and Education: Contexts of Rupture, Change and Possibilities’. A workshop in Delhi was held in August 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 will be published in 2025 as part of a special journal edition with Comparative Education Studies.

Yamini has presented findings from this study at various national and international conferences including at University of Regensburg, University of Trier and GHI-London. In 2023, she 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. She is exploring the various facets of these digital education markets, with focus on educational inequality, to take up as her next project. 

Publications

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 IndiaMax 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 Education42(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.

Forthcoming Publications

Agarwal, Yamini. (Forthcoming). ‘Urban Marginalisation, Exclusion and Education: The Widows’ Colony in Delhi’, in Geetha B. Nambissan, Nandini Manjrekar, Indra Sengupta and Shivali Tukdeo (eds), Shifting Landscapes: Education and Urban Transformations.