Abstract:
India’s Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act (2009) (RTE) presents as a driver of change for greater equity in and through education. Section 12(1)(c) of the RTE signifies a policy directed towards promoting a greater spread and sharing of responsibility for social justice. Scholars such as Jacques Derrida and Iris Marion Young have argued that responsibility is a keystone in addressing social in/justice. Through an ethnographic study of the effects of this equity policy at an elite school in India, I engage Derrida’s concept of hospitality and extend Young’s (2011) notion of ‘tools of oppression’ to encompass what I identify as ‘sentiment tools of oppression’. I argue that the operation of these ‘sentiment tools’ threatens to compromise the hospitality, in Derridean terms, made possible towards Others at this school as part of its response to the equity reform. Drawing on three waves of data collection and with the help of Sara Ahmed’s concept ‘just feelings’ and Arlie Russell Hochschild’s ‘framing rules’ and ‘feeling rules’, I focus this discussion on the expression of compassion as a sentiment tool. The operationalisation of this sentiment tool helps shape the conditions under which hospitality can be given and received at the school in the context of the RTE’s equity policy. I show how this occurs through the establishment and maintenance of what I call a ‘circle of worry’ and through feeling and framing rules that regulate agency and responsibility. In doing so, I reveal a distinct disinclination among key stakeholders at this elite school to be part of structural change towards equity in education and to reducing social injustice. Instead, by engaging with feelings of compassion, they avoid responsibilities for making significant and structural change, pointing to the various ways through which elite institutions can derail the intent of equity policies.