Published in the Journal Gender and Education, “Going bahar (outside) for higher education: gendered symbolic boundaries of higher education access & choice in Haryana, India” is the latest paper to come from the first Fair Chance Foundation (FCF) research project ‘A Fair Chance for Education: Gendered Pathways to Educational Success in Haryana'.

Authored by Emily Henderson, S. Arokia Mary, Denisse Lillo, Ragini Khurana, Anjali Thomas, & Nidhi S. Sabharwal, this paper focuses on the notion of going bahar (‘outside’ in Hindi) for higher education (HE). While the gendered nature of spatial decision-making about HE access is somewhat neglected in the international literature, these discussions are prevalent in India, where commuting to a higher education institution or staying in student accommodation may be considered risky for young women's honour. This article argues that analysis on this topic in the Indian context also has pertinence for gendered analysis of spatial decision-making for HE choices across international contexts.

The paper focuses on a corpus of references to bahar from the qualitative data gathered via interviews, focus group discussions and surveys for an empirical study of gender and access to HE in Haryana, India, and deploys Judith Butler's 1997 work, Excitable speech: A politics of the performative Link opens in a new windowto theorize bahar as a performative construct which both describes and enacts constraint. The paper maps the spatial and symbolic dimensions of the bahar construct, and then explores the discursive construction of women's HE access/choice, revealing the use of bahar as the demarcation of acceptable HE access for women.

• Access the OPEN ACCESS paper at https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09540253.2024.2430188Link opens in a new window

• Read about the first FCF funded project - A Fair Chance for Education: Gendered Pathways to Educational Success in HaryanaLink opens in a new window

• Read about the follow-on FCF funded project that is currently running to 2026 – www.warwick.ac.uk/waheiLink opens in a new window