Stanford Humanities Center
Isabel Salovaara is a PhD candidate in Anthropology at Stanford University. Her work on tutoring, coaching, and test preparation in Delhi and Patna has examined supplemental education institutions as sites of aspiration for women. She holds an M.Phil. in Social Anthropology from the University of Cambridge and has previously taught at OP Jindal Global University in India.
SHC Project
Engendering the State: Aspiration, Government Jobs, and the Coaching Industry in Bihar, India
Salovaara's dissertation addresses how aspirational processes of preparing for a government job refigure caste, gender, and youth politics in the shifting material and moral economies of post-liberalization urban India. She conducted her Ph.D. fieldwork in Patna, Bihar, attending classes and trainings in coaching institutes that specialize in entrance exams for lower-level, non-technical posts in the bureaucracy, public sector banks, and the police. Through a focus on young women seeking to become agents, rather than objects, of state power and surveillance, her work reassesses the nature of aspiration, the state as an object of desire, and the intersectional gender dynamics of social mobility.
