Living in the Fringe of Society: An Auto/Ethnography of Chepang Youths in Higher Education

Abstract

Education has helped me see the world through others’ eyes. This has greatly benefited my family and me by providing me with the qualifications to compete in the neoliberal-led employment market. However, the other Chepang graduates may not have had the same experience. Growing up as an Indigenous Chepang community member has its own set of hardships and struggles, with disability and gender adding another degree of marginalization. An Auto/Ethnographic approach is used to inquire oneself on our journey of higher education, questioning ourselves on how do Chepang graduates describe experiences of accessing, pursuing, and continuing higher education. The main research questions here is what social and socio-economic hardships faced and what it means “to be educated”for being a Chepang youths in accessing and continuing higher education, and how do these challenges shape their educational choices and aspirations and how higher education practices influence Chepang students’ learning experiences. I have interviewed seven graduates and inquired myself as a main informant for the dissertation research. I examined the narratives through the lens of transformative learning theory, Marxian perspective on education for interpreting education, curriculum and pedagogy related issues, and Bourdieu cultural reproduction and production theory for interpreting the knowing, reasoning and understanding of the educated participants life style and their transformative role in transforming to them self, their community and society. Together, these theoretical perspectives illuminate how higher education functions simultaneously as a site of reproduction and possible transformation for Chepang youths, perpetuating marginalization through cultural and epistemic exclusion while potentially offering tools for understanding and challenging that marginalization, a paradox that can only be understood through careful attention to Chepang graduates' own narratives of their educational experiences and aspirations. To conclude, although education plays both the role of fostering critical consciousness, liberation or maintaining the status quo of oppression and several studies mentions that higher education has the potential to raise critical consciousness among Chepang youths, but it has not really been the case in reality. Education has not really encouraged critical thinking and advocate to challenge the systemic forces of marginalization. This study advocates for decolonized education that embraces Indigenous knowledge and supports Indigenous Peoples' self-determined development in Nepal.