Lifeworlds of Leadership: Entrepreneurial Subjectivities in Indian Education

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My research explores Indian middle-class graduates who have launched social enterprises to improve schooling for India's urban poor. I focus on how the drive for self-development - especially self-awareness, self-discipline, self-management - have become central to the education for social change discourse in India. Both graduates joining this entrepreneurial education reform movement and the supposed beneficiaries are taught to value 'leadership' and specifically an 'entrepreneurial' form of leadership. My ethnographic research documents the subjectivities produced when middle-class graduates seek both their own self-actualisation and the democratisation of education through launching social enterprises that partner with the government. The role of 'social entrepreneur' seemingly allows graduates to become both ethical subjects, who offer Gandhian 'service' to the nation, and modern, entrepreneurial citizens who display the neoliberal capacity to self-optimise. The problem is that chasing self-actualisation via entrepreneurial leadership produces an ahistorical self and obscures the historical and social structures which continue to reproduce inequality in India. By using affect theory, I argue that over attention to self creates anxiety in educationalists. Graver still, educationalists teach school children that (ahistorical) self-reflection build leadership 'skills' and these skills will ensure their social mobility (Irani 2019; Desai 2020). These education regimes are poised to a create new generation of anxious subjects without the social or financial capital that protects the established middle-class. By developing research methods that reveal affective experience I identify a subjective tension and anxiety that characterises the education development industry in India.My unique theoretical framework blends feminist and decolonial ontologies (Barad 2007; Todd 2016; Tuhiwai Smith 1998), affect theory (Ahmed 2015; Berlant 2011), and participatory theatre as focus group (Boal 1995; Makepeace 2021). By using this framework, I have developed a new ethnographic concept so that the 'entrepreneurial subjectivity' of educationalists can be studied empirically. The concept, affective intensity, draws focus to the complexity of attempting to meet two paths of self-development through a single socio-professional role - in the case of my research: the role of social entrepreneur.To publicise and disseminate this new tool and my empirical findings on entrepreneurial leadership, I will use the postdoc project to publish my thesis as a book: Lifeworlds of Leadership: Entrepreneurial Subjectivities in Indian Education. The book uses Indian entrepreneurs as a case study for how subjectification can be studied via attention to affect. Manuscript preparation will be closely supervised by SOAS's Professor Sanjay Srivastava, an expert in researching how India's liberalisation is shaping subjectivities and social inequality, to ensure the book can be used by undergraduates, established academics, and members of India's education development industry.The network of NGOs I study and work with in India have influence over 300 million children from low-income families across the country, and have forged public-private-partnerships with the government to shape educational policy (e.g. Happiness Curriculum in Delhi). To ensure my research has a direct impact on these NGOs, I will co-produce a podcast on entrepreneurial leadership with Mainak Roy, CEO of fast-growing Delhi-based start-up Simple Education Foundation. The podcast will host interviews with social entrepreneurs of education to link their lived experience of leadership with my anthropological insights - and shift policy in education development programs and pedagogies.I will also host trainings for ECRs in the UBEL network to share how my novel concept affective intensity can shape creative research methodologies in the social sciences.