Teach for India is perhaps the most influential education NGO in contemporary India. While the organisation – and its parent Teach For All – have been rightly critiqued for their neoliberal ideology, there are younger organisations on the fringes of the NGO conglomerate who are anti-capitalist and critically conscious. Wider Community (pseudonym) are a Delhi-based NGO who teach urban middle-class youth that capitalism is the central cause of climate change and combat this logic by promoting self-reflection as a mode of international development. The NGO hosts village-based retreats where they direct youth to learn from long-standing rural sustainability techniques and support this education through arts-based reflection exercises that link self-change with social change.
Based on 15-months’ ethnographic fieldwork volunteering with Wider Community, this paper examines the benefits and drawbacks of the NGO’s pedagogic method by analysing how youth respond to the training and how it influences their conception of ‘development’. A key finding is that a Gandhian philosophy permeates the training, and through the paper I explore the extent to which the spiritual and political valence of self-as-the-locus-of-social-change resists and/or co-opts neoliberal ideology. I link this question to my wider research on the rise of entrepreneurial subjectivity in international development youth training and schooling and seek to provoke a conversation on the potential of psychologised ‘self-work’ for subverting mainstream development narratives.
