RUCHI SAINI

I am a Ph.D. candidate in the International Education Policy program at the University of Maryland, College Park. I come from the north Indian state of Haryana, and my scholarship is deeply rooted in my lived experience as an educator and administrator across K-12 schools in India. My research investigates the structural and cultural determinants of gender-based violence in formal education spaces, especially within the post-colonial contexts of South Asia and Africa. My work uses an anti colonial and antiracist approach to researching the lived experiences of marginalized students within formal education spaces. I am particularly interested in the use of arts-based methodologies to study sensitive research topics via collaboration b/w the researcher and the researched. I graduated with a Master’s in English literature from the University of Delhi (India), where I was a gold medalist, and a Master’s in Education from the University of Glasgow (Scotland), where I was a Chevening fellow.

Dissertation Research

Funded by the 2023 NA/Ed Spencer Dissertation Fellowship, the 2023 ICRW Mariam Chamberlain Dissertation Fellowship, and the 2022 Ann G.Wylie Dissertation Fellowship

How Universities Shape Students’ Experiences with Gender-Based Violence in India: An Intersectional Feminist Narrative Inquiry

My doctoral dissertation is a narrative inquiry that employs an intersectional feminist framework to investigate how female students’ experiences with GBV at a large public university in India are shaped by the structural and cultural characteristics of the institution. I employ the notions of “structure” and “culture” as heuristic tools to separate the formal limitations (=structure) on institutional stakeholders from the largely unspoken collective assumptions and values (=culture) that guide their actions. The research design involves three interdependent levels of investigation undertaken over fifteen months:

1) focus group discussions with bystanders (n=60) of GBV
2) art-based narrative interviews with self-identified victim-survivors (n=20) of GBV, and
3) key informant interviews with student leaders (n=10) of college societies advocating for victim-survivors.

In the dissertation, I theorize how a high power distance culture in India interacts with neoliberalism and heteropatriarchy within university spaces to create conditions of institutional betrayal for marginalized students on campus. By providing female students with a platform to own and control their narratives, the study has the potential to disrupt the essentializing image of Indian women as passive victims and will be helpful in building more inclusive universities

Sketch by a research participant

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About the sketch and the artist

The artist is a third year undergraduate student at the Indian University (site of my dissertation study) who participated in an art-based narrative interview with me (Step-2 of data collection). A self-identified victim survivor of GBV, the student was stalked and threatened by a male classmate for six months. When her parents got to know about it, she was forced to drop out of college and had to move back to her native state, Rajasthan. At home, she was constantly chastised for bringing dishonour to her family, and experienced severe physical abuse . Given below is an excerpt from the interview:

“I painted this because in our society, the only and the foremost culprit is the girl, be it from the eyes of our friends, our family, our partner, and not to be forgotten, the so called “society”. Even parents fail to understand their child because of the fear of the society and choose to stay quiet, no matter how hard times their child is going through”