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Sangeeta Kamat (Ph.D., University of Pittsburgh, 1998) skamat@educ.umass.edu
My scholarly and practical work has been inspired by the extraordinary work
of numerous community based organizations in India, and other parts of the Third
World. Their tireless efforts to articulate an alternative discourse of development
have informed my research questions and methods. During my undergraduate and
graduate years in India, I was fortunate to work with, and learn from, a remarkable
array of community based organizations that worked both in the urban slums of
Bombay and in the neighboring rural districts of the region. I worked in non-formal
education programs related to health and other social issues with women and
youth in these communities. These experiences have had a lasting impact upon
me, and have continued to shape my research work in the U.S.
My dissertation research developed out of one of the enduring debates of our
times that has deep implications for the future of community based organizations
- what is the role of civil society organizations in constituting development
programs and policies; what should be their role; in what ways does this transform
the state as we know it; how does a rapidly developing "third sector" re-envision
democratic societies? These questions have direct implications for policy making
in the field of international development.
In my more recent work, I have broadened the focus of these questions to study
policy reforms in international education and their implications for the changing
relations between state and civil society. My interest is to analyze the construction
of new discourses through these reforms - discourses that pertain to citizenship,
nationalism, and other global and local identities.
Research Interests: