Non-State Education and Ethnic Conflict in Myanmar

该网络旨在将在伦敦从事教育、知识和族裔冲突研究的学者与缅甸的教育研究人员和从业人员聚集在一起。其主要目的是分析非国家教育在缅甸竞争性的国家建设项目和种族冲突中的作用。这样做的目的是：a）就缅甸冲突地区非国家少数民族教育制度的广泛情况产生学术和政策相关知识，B）帮助缅甸少数民族社区教育工作者和研究人员的能力建设，以及c）通报该国的教育改革，包括参与改革进程的国际捐助者。这一点很重要，因为教育长期以来一直是缅甸暴力建国的主要工具，包括强迫少数民族同化。与此同时，相互竞争的非国家教育制度已经成为少数民族招募的众多革命运动的抵抗手段之一。为了分析这些非国家教育制度的政治，该网络将使用参与性研究方法，包括利用其当地参与者的广泛经验的自我民族志方法：教育研究人员本身参与非国家教育的提供。这将有助于解决少数民族教育提供者面临的主要矛盾：1）他们对现代化的渴望与他们创造和维护身份的需要之间的紧张关系，祖先和遗产; 2）反对民族统治国家压迫的抵抗与在民族主义旗帜下将流动和多样的少数民族身份同质化和固化为突出的民族类别的需要之间的紧张关系该网络旨在通过三个讲习班（两个在缅甸，一个在伦敦）应对这些挑战。讲习班将提供一个平台，以连接网络，产生关于缅甸非国立教育的经验和概念知识，为参与者之间分享知识和经验提供一个平台，并通过为政策受众举办研讨会，为缅甸的教育改革和国际捐助者提供信息。该网络还将通过学术、媒体和政策出版物传播其调查结果。

This network aims to bring together London-based scholars working on education, knowledge and ethnonational conflict with education researchers and practitioners in Myanmar. Its main aim is to analyse the role of non-state education in Myanmar's competing nation-building projects and ethnic conflict. In doing so to it aims to a) generate academic and policy-relevant knowledge on the extensive landscape of non-state ethnic minority-based education regimes in Myanmar's conflict zones, to b) aid capacity building of education practitioners and researchers in Myanmar's ethnic minority communities, and to c) to inform the country's education reform, including international donors engaged in the reform process. This is important as education has long served as a main vehicle for Myanmar's violent nation-building, including the forced assimilation of its ethnic minorities. At the same time, competing non-state education regimes have emerged as one of the means of resistance amongst the numerous revolutionary movements recruited from ethnic minorities. In order to analyse the politics of these non-state education regimes the network will use participatory research methods, including auto-ethnographic approaches that draw on the extensive experience of its local participants: education researchers who are themselves involved in non-state education provision. This will help to address the main paradoxes that ethnic-minority education providers are confronted with: 1) the tension between their aspiration to modernity and their need to create and preserve identities, ancestry and heritage and 2) the tension between resistance against an ethnocratic state oppression and the need to homogenise and solidify fluid and diverse ethnic minority identities into salient ethnic categories under the banner of an alternative nationalism.The network aims to address these challenges in three workshops (two in Myanmar and one in London). The workshops will provide the platform to connect the network, generate empirical and conceptual knowledge about non-state education in Myanmar, provide a platform for knowledge and experience sharing between participants, and inform Myanmar's education reform and international donors by incorporating seminars for a policy audience. The network will also disseminate its findings through academic, media and policy publications.