Shifting Landscapes is a rich, multidimensional exploration of urban education in the multiverse of India, adding value to the growing scholarship on broader connections between urbanisation and education. As cities have continued to develop, their spatial, social and cultural landscapes have also evolved to adapt to the global capitalist needs. Education has been an integral part of these transformations, and the upheavals within the education sector have given rise to privilege and exclusion in schooling and growing marginality of the poor. The volume takes on an interdisciplinary approach to examine how the idea of the urban and that of urban education are co-constituted and, more specifically, how spatial and educational inequalities in cities intersect. The chapters bring together diverse contexts to address the heterogeneity of urban social reality in India and similarly document the changes in educational access, provision, aspirations and politics in several parts of the country. This title is available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

‘Shifting Landscapes offers a powerful intervention in the growing global urbanisation resulting in new spatial formations. Through an indispensable conversation between education and urban studies, the volume opens up key axes for understanding processes that cut across the Global South. Its robust conceptual richness and multidisciplinary intermixing capture the changes that have occurred in India's educational and urban systems and the critical transformations that are reinforcing dynamics of inclusion–exclusion. Throughout the volume, the chapters weave together a story of the present, where the changing landscapes of education intersect with the complex forms that urban life takes. Using a range of methodological strategies, the volume delineates a genealogy of the urban and schooling in India that, amidst the whirlwinds of change, offers alternatives for imagining other educational futures.'

Silvia Grinberg - Universidad Nacional de San Martín

‘This book breaks new ground in showing how education structures urban transformations and exclusions in India. It is essential reading for anyone interested in cities, in education and in questions of socio-spatial justice. It skilfully combines historical records, policy evidence and rich ethnography to illuminate how education and urbanisation act as two foundational elements of modernisation. It compellingly demonstrates how changes in educational landscapes have both followed and led the broader neoliberal transformations underway in Indian cities since the mid-1990s. By highlighting the profound social exclusions associated with urban transformations and exploring how struggles to improve educational access might address these injustices, it powerfully underscores the potential of educational reforms to advance socio-spatial justice in cities.'

Lalitha Kamath - Tata Institute of Social Sciences

‘Shifting Landscapes brings together a rich collection of chapters on the co-constitution of cities and education in diverse regions and cities in India. Beginning with a grounding in the historical context of urban and educational development in India, the authors employ multidisciplinary conceptual and methodological approaches to unpack how economic and social processes are shaping urban and semi-urban spaces and educational sites in specific locales. Focusing on forces of capital accumulation, labour migration, marginalisation, exclusion and resistance, the book is a theoretically and methodologically generative contribution to research that connects social, economic and cultural processes that are redefining cities and urban education globally in context-specific ways – essential reading for scholars and students of urban studies, education policy and politics.'

Pauline Lipman - University of Illinois Chicago