AbstractsSocial Sciences

This thesis is an auto/ethnographic venture to explore the politics of bullying inside Bangladeshi classrooms. The thesis explores bullying in the frameworks of affect, anti-oppressive and intersectional gender pedagogy. Using autoethnographic and ethnographic means, the author revisits past encounters of being bullied and collects data from four schools in Dhaka, Bangladesh, drawing connections between narratives and theories. The thesis explores how schools fix and essentialize the identities of bully and bullied in discursive readings, which result in troubling approaches to deal with bullying, such as discipline, punishment and surveillance, which further exclude and other the bully and bullied. The thesis offers an affective reading of bodies inside classrooms, and employs theories of anti-oppressive and intersectional gender pedagogy to address and bring down the binary between bully and bullied, address power relations in classrooms and revise the roles of teachers and students. By acknowledging tensions and disruptions, aiming for self-reflexivity and transgressions, it offers a reading of how to think of transformations and turn the classroom into a ‘risky,’ yet generative space, to start a dialogue about bullying.