Miriam Thangaraj

Miriam Thangaraj is a 2nd-year student in the Educational Policy Studies department, with a concentration in International and Comparative Education. She is broadly interested in how global norms are translated into local idiom in national education policy, and understood and embodied within classrooms and school-based communities in India. Her research this summer, supported by the Scott Kloeck-Jenson grant, looks at ‘official’ constructions of ‘vulnerability’ within education policy discourses, to explicate how vulnerable children, such as ‘rehabilitated’ child laborers, experience these implicitly universalizing norms within schools, in ways that empower/disempower them in their local contexts. Her academic interests are motivated by her personal experience of the opportunities represented by globalization—Miriam has a master’s in international education policy from Harvard University and was one of the first few women sales managers for Coca-Cola in India—and an urgency to investigate how and for whom such emancipatory claims of globalization may indeed hold true.

Read more about Miriam’s fellowship experience here.