Achala Gupta

My research focusses on education (private tutoring or 'shadow education; higher education), young people's aspirations, and social inequalities, with a regional focus on Asia and Europe.

I have been involved in various research projects, exploring higher education, international student mobility, and 'shadow education', with regional focus on Asia and Europe:

1. Currently, I am a member of the Eurostudents project -- funded by European Research Council, and led by Professor Rachel Brooks.

This project explores how higher education students are constructed in six European countries (England, Ireland, Germany, Denmark, Spain, and Poland).
I have contributed to papers focusing on: aspirations of young people; the purpose of higher education as articulated by European students; transitions of young people; students as political actors, among others (http://eurostudents.net/project-outputs/). These works explore how marketisation processes and policy enactments have affected students' experiences of HE - and how these experiences are shared and not-shared by country and higher education institution.

2. Before joining the project team, I worked at the Asia Research Institute (ARI), the National University of Singapore as a Research Associate

At ARI, I worked on a project on Global Asian Universities and International Students’ Mobilities (in Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Taiwan, and China).

3. My doctoral research was an institutional ethnography that examined educational practices in the formal education system from the vantage point of private tutoring (‘shadow education’) in contemporary India. The research outputs show:

The dynamic of class relations in attaining educational privilege in Indian middle-class families (DOI: 10.1080/01425692.2019.1660142)
The practices of teacher-entrepreneurialism (outlining why teachers become tutors) DOI: 10.1080/17508487.2019.1708765)