Mumbai Campus, School of Education
M.Sc. (Mumbai),
M.Phil.,
Ph.D. (MS University, Baroda)
nandini [at]tiss[dot]edu 
nandini@tiss.edu
Nandini Manjrekar is Professor and Dean, School of Education, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai. Her teaching and research spans the following disciplinary and interdisciplinary domains: sociology and social history of education, curriculum studies, gender studies, and contemporary studies of schooling, marginalisation and education, with a focus on social and political conflict that impact the experiences and aspirations of youth. Her research has largely focused on the micro and macro features of the contemporary political economy of education in the Indian context, with an explicit focus on gender. Through ethnographic and textual analysis, her work locates this context within and draws on wider colonial and postcolonial discourse, both local and global, and also examines regionally contextual experiences which shape the policy imagination of education of youth as well as their pathways to work within the contemporary neoliberal economy. Since 2013 she has been involved in teaching and research in the area of history of education in the Indian context. Two studies in the history of Indian education are being currently completed: one on the Baroda princely state in late nineteenth and early twentieth century, and public education in the mill district of Bombay from 1900 to 1945.
She has published widely in journals and edited books. Among her recent publications is an invited paper for the Argentinian journal, Espacio de Blanco (2020) and a co-authored paper on Gender and School Reforms in India ( Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Education. Oxford University Press, 2022). She edited a reader on Gender and Education in India, published by Aakar Books in 2021. Since 2016, she has been Principal Investigator, along with Prof Geetha Nambissan (JNU) and Dr Shivali Tukdeo (NIAS) and Indra Sengupta (GHIL) on a project 'Education and the Urban' of the Max Weber Stiftung and German Historical Institute London. As part of the Working Paper Series, a paper was published based on research on education in the mill district of Bombay city in the early twentieth century.
Dr Manjrekar has been part of various national policy research and monitoring groups in education and also have had a deep engagement with civil society and non-profit organisations working with women, youth and community. She was a member of the National Focus Group on Gender Issues in Education (2005), and has been a member of several review missions under the Ministry of Human Resource Development, Government of India. She was also part of a select committee to draft a vision document for education in the state of Jammu and Kashmir ( 2013-15).
Dr Manjrekar served as President, Comparative Education Society of India between 2020 and 2022. She has also served on the Executive Committee of the Indian Association of Women's Studies (2012-2014). She has served for several years on the Editorial Board of Comparative Education Dialogue (Sage) and is currently on the Editorial Advisory Board of the Journal of Education Policy (Taylor and Francis).
Dr Manjrekar was at the University of Wisconsin-Madison as a Fulbright Fellow (1997-98) and has taught in the Women and Gender Studies Programme, Massachusetts Institute of Technology(MIT), Cambridge, USA (2005-2006). She has been a visiting fellow at the German Historical Institute London (2016 and 2019), and the Georg Eckert Institute of International Textbook Research, Germany, in 2018.
Sociology of education
Gender and education
Education and conflict
Childhood in social and historical perspective
History of education in princely states
Through the Looking Glass : Gender Socialisation in a Primary School, in T.S.Saraswathi (ed.), Culture, Socialisation and Human Development, New Delhi : Sage, 1999, pp. 336-355.
Schooling on the Margins of Development: A Village-level Study in Shivrajpur, Panchmahals District, Gujarat (with Tehzeeb Surti), New Delhi: National Institute of Educational Planning and Administration , 2000.
Landscapes of a different kind, Review of Anthropological Explorations in Gender by Leela Dube, Indian Journal of Gender Studies, Vol. 9, No. 2, December 2002.
Education of Adolescents in India: Context and Constraints, in F. Pajares & T. Urdan (Eds.) International Perspectives on Adolescence, Information Age Publishing, 2003, pp. 347-369. (Co-author with T S Saraswathi and Prathana Pant)
Contemporary Challenges to Women's Education: Towards an Elusive Goal?, Review of Women's Studies, Economic and Political Weekly, Vol 38 No 43 October 25, 2003.
Schooling Inequity, Review of Gender and Social Equity in Primary Education in India: Hierarchies of Access by Vimala Ramachandran (ed.)) in Comparative Education Dialogue , Vol. 2, No.2, Spring 2005, pp. 245-248.
The Hindutva View of History: Rewriting Textbooks in India and the United States,with Visweswaran,K., Witzel, M., Bhog, D. and Chakravarti, U. 2008, Georgetown Journal of International Affairs, 10 (1): Winter/Spring 2009: 101-112.
Textbook Regimes: A Study of Nation and Identity in Gujarat, New Delhi: Nirantar, 2010.
'Images of Hindu Girlhood: Reading Vidya Bharati's 'Balika Shikshan' (Girls' Education)', Childhood 2011 18(3): 350-366.
School Education, Pluralism and Marginality: Comparative Perspectives by Christine Sleeter, Shashi Bhushan Upadhyay,Arvind K Mishra. & Kumar Sanjay (Eds), Contemporary Education Dialogue, Vol. 10, No. 2, pp. 284-288, July 2013.
'Gender, Childhood, and Work in the Nation: Voices and Encounters in an Indian School', in S.Srinivas Rao and Geetha Nambissan (eds.), Sociology of Education in India: Changing Contours and Emerging Concerns, Oxford University Press, 2013, pp. 157-181.
'Women School Teachers in New Times: Some Preliminary Reflections', Indian Journal of Gender Studies, Vol. 20, Issue 2, 2013, pp. 335-356.
The Neighbourhood and the School: Education, Marginalisation and the State in Gujarat (Commissioned paper for Transnational Research Group (TRG), German Historical Institute, April 2015) www.perspectivia.net
‘Education in the ‘Sanskarnagari’: Baroda, provincial capital of a 'progressive' princely state in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century’, in William Pink and George T. Noblit, (eds.), Second International Handbook of Urban Education, Springer, 2016, pp.369-395.
'Neoliberal Educational Reforms and Feminisation of School Teaching', in Mary John and Meena Gopal, Worlds of Labour: Feminism and Social Reproduction (forthcoming 2020, Orient Blackswan)
Gender and Education in India: A Reader ( Aakar, 2020)
Entre el barrio y la escuela: Identidad, marginalidad y educación en una ciudad de India. ESPACIOS EN BLANCO. Revista De Educación (Serie Indagaciones), 2020, 2(30), 313 - 333. (Translated into Spanish by M. Bocchio). https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.37177/UNICEN/EB30-280
(With Poushali Basak) Public Education in Bombay’s Mill District in the Early Twentieth Century”, Education and the Urban in India Working Paper Series 11 ( 2021) .
'Researching Women Teachers in New Times: Some Preliminary Reflections' in Mary E John and Meena Gopal (eds.) Women in the Worlds of Labour: Interdisciplinary and Intersectional Perspectives, Orient Blackswan (2021).
Public Education in Bombay’s Mill District in the Early Twentieth Century (with P Basak), Working Paper No. 11, Education and the Urban, Max Weber Stiftung-GHI London, 1-37, 2021. DOI:10.25360/01-2021-00003.
Manjrekar, N., & Sundararaman, I. 2022. Gender and school reform in India. In Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Education. Oxford University Press. doi: https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190264093.013.431
Against the grain: Education of adolescent girls of the urban poor ( 2004)
Women's contribution to social development (Baroda: 1890s - 1990s) ( 2004)
Textbook Regimes: A Study of Nation and Identity in Gujarat ( Nirantar Trust, Delhi, 2010)
Impact of Sangati Curriculum on Students and Teachers of Municipal Schools in Mumbai, October 2009 (AVEHI ABACUS Charitable Trust, Mumbai)
Education, Conflict and Gender: Girls' Schooling in post-2002 Gujarat (MS, TISS- Department of Research Support supported )
Impact Assessment of a Private-Public Partnership Project in MCGM Schools: Muktangan, Mumbai, 2013
Education in a Zone of Conflict: A Situation Assessment of UNICEF's interventions with NGOS in southern Chhattisgarh, UNICEF-CG, India, 2015
Education and the princely state: Baroda, 1875-1940 (individual), 2018-
Public education in the mill district of Bombay, 1900-1945 (Max Weber Stiftung, German Historical Institute, London), 2018-2020
Masters in Education:
Sociology of Education
History of Education
Gender and Education
Research Methods
Masters in Media and Cultural Studies:
Qualitative Research Methods: Ethnography
Masters in Women's Studies:
Gender, Ideology and Education
