About the Speaker – Deepti Sreeram is a fourth year PhD candidate at the School of Sociology and Anthropology at Ashoka University. Her work explores the question of quality in higher education through an ethnographic study of a heritage educational institution based in Kozhikode. She was recently awarded the Prof KV Krishna Ayyar Scholar award, an award instituted to honour original research related to the heritage and  history of Kozhikode in Kerala, for her doctoral research project. Deepti has an MPhil in Linguistics from Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi and a Master's in Linguistics from English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad. She is currently an editor at Ala, a Kerala Studies Blog dedicated to publishing emerging studies on Kerala in both English and Malayalam and a co-founder of the Reading Kerala Forum that is dedicated to reading any form of literature or scholarship related to Kerala. Her more recent work related to  fieldworking Kozhikode was published in Ethnographic Marginalia, a platform dedicated to documenting dispatches from the field and Ala. 

Abstract for the talk – Kerala has received widespread acclaim for its investment in public education. However, over the last two decades, there is an emergent public discourse questioning the quality of students, teachers and education in Kerala. Drawing on fieldwork conducted at a well-known college in Kozhikode, located in the northern region of Kerala, this talk will explore how the social world of examinations, often identified as a visible measurement of quality, produces shifting speculative assessments of the student and the teacher. Through exploratory scenes directly or indirectly related to examinations, this talk intends to show how such assessments are made and what kinds of contestations emerge in relation to such evaluations. How do these assessments make us think of quality differently?

About the Research Scholars Colloquium –  The Research Scholars Colloquium at the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Ashoka University, is led by our graduate students. It is meant to provide a generative platform for PhD scholars in sociology, anthropology, and other related disciplines and fields to present their research to an encouraging audience of fellow researchers. The Colloquium provides an opportunity for researchers, from India and across the world, to present their work at varying stages of ideation and preparation, to create a space for productive conversations and mutual learning. For the participants/audience, this is a chance to engage with cutting edge research as it is formulated, explored and developed by graduate students.