UW–Madison’s Kirchgasler featured on FreshEd podcast


UW–Madison’s Christopher Kirchgasler was featured with Karishma Desai on a recent episode of the FreshEd podcast, speaking about the Comparative Education Review article they co-authored titled, “ ‘Girl’ in Crisis: Colonial Residues of Domesticity in Transnational School Reforms.”

Chris Kirchgasler
Kirchgasler

Kirchgasler is an assistant professor with the School of Education’s Department of Curriculum and Instruction. Desai is an assistant professor at Rutgers University’s Graduate School of Education.

Their article examines investment in girls’ education in Kenya as a “salve to the Global South that will alleviate poverty, prevent terrorism, and curb gender-based violence,” according to the paper’s abstract.

On the podcast, they examine some of the colonial legacies in these discourses around girls’ education.

Kirchgasler explained that in some of the models of education that were initially imported to British Sub-Saharan African colonies, there is an idea that men and women have different roles in development. Women, in particular, were understood to have a fundamental responsibility to child-rearing and homemaking.

Women were depicted as having a “special role” in development, said Kirchgasler, “and that role had to be inculcated through a distinct form of education, a distinct set of responsibilities, that was going to transform the colony — which was depicted in this backwards state — as being able to uplift itself.”

“This was displacing the responsibility for development onto those who were going to be developed,” said Kirchgasler.

To learn more, check out the full podcast at freshedpodcast.com, here.

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