Paper: ‘Low-cost’ private school chains for the poor and the rise of edu-capitalism in South Africa
Affiliation: Open Society Foundations, Higher Education Support Programme
Bursary Awarded: 2015
In 2015, I was honoured to receive a bursary to attend the UKFIET conference held in Oxford. At that time, I was a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Johannesburg where I was conducting a research on the rise of low-fee for-profit private schools in South Africa. Unfortunately, the University of Johannesburg did not set aside funding to support the participation of its postdoctoral research fellows to national or international conferences. The bursary – a waiver of the registration fees – greatly helped me to attend the conference. I presented my initial research findings in a panel focused on the topic of private schooling. It gave me the opportunity to confront my work with similar research conducted in other parts of the world but through different theoretical and empirical perspectives. The presentations and the feed-back from the audience helped me refine my own research. In 2016 I finally published an article in the Oxford Review of Education that was directly based on this initial paper. As a fresh researcher, who had recently completed her PhD, the participation to the conference represented an invaluable way to build up networks. As a bursary recipient, I was also invited to a diner that gathered all bursary recipients and some members of the UKFIET trust committee. This was a unique opportunity to exchange on my work with both my peers and prominent scholars in the field. I am very grateful to the Committee for this support.
Sonia presented her paper ‘Low-cost’ private school chains for the poor and the rise of edu-capitalism in South Africa at the conference.
