Suturing Together Girls and Education: An Investigation Into the Social (Re)Production of Girls’ Education as a Hegemonic Ideology

There seems to be a global consensus that girls’ education is a commonsensical solution to issues as wide-ranging as poverty, fertility, human trafficking, and terrorism in the global south. In this article, I inquire into how this common sense about girls’ education is produced and sustained. I examine how two radically specific happenings—the shooting of Malala Yousafzai in Pakistan in 2012, and the kidnapping of schoolgirls in Chibok, Nigeria in 2014—were transformed into events of international concern and how girls’ education has come to be proposed as the solution. In doing so, I highlight the histories and the social and political realities that common sense conceals and its implications for the well-being of populations in the global south.