Rachel Silver

Rachel Silver is a joint-degree doctoral candidate in Educational Policy Studies and Cultural Anthropology. She holds an MA in African Studies from Yale University and is co-author of Educated for Change?: Muslim Refugee Women in the West, as well as chapters in edited volumes on gender and forced migration, globalization and education, and meeting ethnography. Rachel received an SKJ fellowship to develop her dissertation project, which explores the diverse meanings attached to schoolgirl pregnancy in Malawi. Specifically, she will use Malawi’s 1993 and 2016 Readmission Policies, which ban the practice of permanently expelling pregnant girls from school, as nodes through which to examine how stakeholders in the field of girls’ education conceptualize gender and the relationship between fertility, sexuality, and schooling. She will ask why, though young mothers in Malawi have been allowed to re-enroll in school for over two decades, very few do. Taken together, her dissertation works to interrogate longstanding frictions around production, reproduction, and the constitution of power in the gendered project of “development.”