Dr. Vidya Subramanian is a sociologist of education researching education policy and development, civil society and public-private partnerships, and entrepreneurial cultures among urban youth. She has a PhD and MPhil from the Zakir Husain Centre for Educational Studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University, during which she was a doctoral fellow at the Transnational Research Group (TRG) of the Max Weber Foundation-German Humanities Institutes Abroad. She also holds an MA in Development Studies from the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai. She has taught at TISS Mumbai and was earlier a consultant to the Tata Trusts. Her ongoing research explores the trajectories of young corporate professionals entering the developmental sector to further aspirations of service, self-making, and entrepreneurship. This extends her doctoral work that examined the Teach for India (TFI) programme for its intersecting discourses of corporate philanthropy, PPPs, and new forms of governance in public education. Parts of her work have been published in Economic and Political Weekly, Contemporary Education Dialogue, and International Studies in Sociology of Education.
In addition, she was also one of the co-PIs of a Spencer Foundation funded international conference on Educational Transformations and Societal Change in Liberalising India, in collaboration with Ahmedabad University, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Rutgers University (New Brunswick) and the Centre for Budget and Policy Studies.
Peer-reviewed journal articles & book chapters
- Framing teachers in National Education Policy and in the popular media: Discourses on teachers and their work in South Asia. (With Yusuf Sayed and Manish Jain.) In Global Education Systems: Handbook of Education Systems in South Asia, edited by Padma M. Sarangapani and Rekha Pappu. Berlin: Springer. (2020)
- “We aren’t teachers, we are leaders”: Situating the Teach for India programme. In Teach For All Counter Narratives: International Perspectives on a Global Reform Movement. Edited by T. Jameson Brewer, et al. Bern: Peter Lang. (2020)
- Parallel partnerships: Teach for India and new institutional regimes in municipal schools in New Delhi. International Studies in Sociology of Education (2019).
- From government to governance: Teach for India and new networks of reform in school education. Contemporary Education Dialogue 15 (1): 21–50. (2018)
- Is education news? (with Padma Sarangapani). Economic and Political Weekly 46 (42): 69–76. (2011)
Book Reviews
- Forging the Ideal Educated Girl: The Production of Desirable Subjects in Muslim South Asia, by Shenila Khoja-Moolji. Compare: A Journal of Comparative and International Education, 50 (3): 455–457. (2019)
- The Class: Living and Learning in the Digital Age, by Julian Sefton-Green and Sonia Livingstone. International Studies in Sociology of Education, 27 (1): 100–102. (2018)
- This Gift of English: English Education and the Formation of Alternative Hegemonies in India, by Alok K. Mukherjee. Economic and Political Weekly, 44 (32): 30–32. (2009)
- I am presently a Co-Principal Investigator in an international comparative study on teacher education. regulation and governance across BRICS countries.The project is funded by the Scheme for Promotion of Academic and Research Collaboration (SPARC), Ministry of Human Resource Development India. The project is being conducted in collaboration with the University of Sussex and the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai. (2019-2021)