16. Scaling Educational Policy and Practice Intersectionally: Historical and Contemporary Cases from South and Southeast Asia

Gender, race, caste, class, and religion, to name just a few axes of differentiation, are social constructs that have inflected the varied and unequal lives of people throughout the world for generations—some forever. To date, most have been investigated individually. Since the inception of the intersectionality framework by feminists two decades ago, however, it is now superior to analyse them as entwined, as mutually constitutive. Such intersectional approaches promise to enhance insights into continued inequalities at local, regional, national, as well as international scales. Intersectional scholars note, however, that this framework has yet to reach its potential theoretically, methodologically, and practically. A case in point is its underdevelopment within public policy discourse and application (Hankivsky and Cormier, Political Research Quarterly 64:217–229, 2011). In this chapter, the authors apply theoretical and methodological advances to the intersectionality framework from previous publications (e.g., Mahler, Chaudhuri, and Patil, Sex Roles 73:100–112, 2015) to the critical public policy sector of education. They examine how historical and contemporary education policies have been gendered and ethnicized in cases from South and Southeast Asia. Their intersectional analysis documents how policies and the people affected by them are negotiated simultaneously across multiple social scales—historical as well as geographical—en route to discriminatory outcomes.