Significance of feminist advocacy practices for sdg 4

Abstract

The cherished goals of SDG 4 of ensuring inclusive and equitable quality education and promotion of life-long learning opportunities point to enfranchising the epistemically marginalized. Advocacy of representing, arguing or recommending a disadvantaged epistemic position is to envisage change in social and epistemic contexts. The normative ethos within which we internalize, affirm and challenge knowledge is an instituted social imaginary of coercive nature. Thus, taking into account the situatedness of the knower and critically engaging with imaginative possibilities is to shift the focus from the dominant instituted narratives to democratically negotiating knowledge-claims. The Beti Bachavo Beti Padhavo (BBBP) and Understanding of Lifelong Learning for All in Society (ULLAS) projects of India reaffirm this factor. The feminist advocacy of the subjugated knowledges also emphasises ecological thinking of co-habitation in bringing about social transformation. The sustainable goals of inclusive and equitable education and promotion of life-long learning need to be analysed from a critical understanding of the power-nexused undercurrents of knowledge and learning processes and reinforcing the newer methods and possibilities of change. The paper argues that adopting feminist advocacy practices as educational methodologies are concomitant to SDG 4.Key words, Advocacy, Critiquing social imaginary, Ecological thinking, SDG 4, BBBP, ULLAS