Gaya Fernando PhD
Independent Academic Lecturer and Trainer
PhD Social Anthropology (University of Edinburgh)
LLM EU & Int. Comparative Law (VUB, Brussels)
Member, Oral History Society, UK
Schooling-in-Wartime in Northern Sri Lanka
A Bourdieusian Exploration
Abstract
This thesis examines the legitimacy of schooling structures and practices in the northern warzone of Sri Lanka during the civil war (1983-2009). Despite war, oppression and displacement, the Tamils in the northern warzone sent their children to school, university, and to sit the national examinations with diligence each year. This was enabled by a peculiar characteristic of the Sri Lankan civil war: the state continued to supply education and health in the same area they were shelling and bombing.
Employing the oral history method, this study places at its centre, the teacher, educator and student.
How did a child in rebel-held territory move through a corridor of state schooling institutions to a place at university?How were educators enabled to intervene in the field of armed power and conduct the A levels as an annual educational event across the lines?
In the thesis I analyse this using the tools of Pierre Bourdieu: habitus, capital and doxa. Locating the field of schooling within the field of rebel-state power, I examine how the complexities of a game qua game unravelled and collided in the lives of the war-affected students in LTTE-controlled schools in the Vanni, and in state and mission schools in the Jaffna peninsula.
I argue that Bourdieu’s notion of illusio is important to better understand how a belief in the legitimacy of the symbolic capital of schooling structures in the social space of positions, held together, over a quarter century of war.
This research concludes that historical dispositions in the habitus enabled the teacher and educator to converge with diverse social agents across the lines in doxic submission to the legitimacy of schooling structures, and that this convergence devolved sanctuary measures on war-affected students.
Questioning Bourdieusian notions of the limited awareness by the social agent of the structures guiding their practice, this study proposes field theory analysis of oral history data as providing significant insights into articulations of self-identification, location in the field, and their commonsense view of the world.
PhD Social Anthropology awarded 2024
School of Social and Political Science, University of Edinburgh
Image above of a former vice-principal of a girls' school in Jaffna was edited using AI for privacy. None of the interviewees were at the time of interviewing and to date, vulnerable to threats or hostility. The content of the interviews on keeping the classrooms open in wartime was accepted by all agents in and beyond Sri Lanka as non-controversial in doxic submission to the historically ingrained disposition to schooling in the Sri Lankan, especially northern Tamil and particularly, in the former warzone.
Image above right of a piece of artillery, shell-casing, displayed on a corner table in the home of another vice-principal of a girls' school in Jaffna, creatively painted and used as a vase. Next to it, stood a family photo of their children and children's children who fled to safer futures and settled in distant lands.