Arathi is a sociologist of education in the University’s Department of Education. Her current research examines reparations and reparative justice in educational systems and practices. She leads the Reparative Futures of Education research programme – www.repair-ed.uk – a five-year ERC Consolidator / UKRI funded project.
Arathi’s interest in reparations has emerged from her scholarship over a number of years which has illuminated the structural injustices of schooling systems. She has examined the politics of educational inequality in the Indian, Australian and UK contexts as well as the global governance of childhood and the family. Underlying much of this research has been an abiding interest in the racial politics of education. Her scholarship has explored the active erasures of racism and coloniality in the field of education and the ways in which racial capitalism sustains educational injustices. Major collaborative works in these areas include: Learning Whiteness: Education and the Settler Colonial State (Pluto, 2022); Black Lives Matter and Global Struggles for Racial Justice in Education (Chicago, 2023); and Learning With the Past: Racism, Education and Reparative Futures (Unesco, 2020).
Prior to joining the University of Oxford, Arathi taught at the Universities of Bristol, Cambridge and Sydney. She is a co-convenor of the Race, Empire and Education Research Collective.
