HomeCollegesCollegesCollege of Humanities and Social SciencesFaculty And StaffAbu DhabiInternational Studies DepartmentprofilesDavid Sancho

David Sancho

Assistant Professor
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Introduction

After completing his undergraduate studies in Anthropology at the University of Florida, David obtained a PhD in Anthropology from the University of Sussex. Subsequently, he received a Leach/RAI Fellowship (2013-2014) to work at Brunel University London, where he worked on the publication of his monograph Youth, Class and Education in Urban India: The year that can break or make you, published with Routledge Press. In 2015, David was awarded a British Academy Post-Doctoral Fellowship at the University of Sussex to conduct research on Indian youth in the Arab Gulf and transnational educational flows. From 2018 to 2019, he worked at the American University in Dubai as an Assistant Professor of International Studies.

Research and Professional Activities

My research engages with the topics of migration, education, youth, citizenship and belonging, sociality, and identity. I have conducted extended ethnographic research in south India and the UAE, focusing primarily on socially and geographically mobile south Indians hailing from Kerala.

Between 2015 and 2018 I led a British Academy funded project, entitled Educating Migrants, which explores the global educational flows between the Middle East and South Asia and their role in shaping the lives and mobilities of young Indian migrants and their families in the context of Dubai. Building on an intergenerational ethnography of Indian migrants, this project highlights the role of education as a driver of migration processes leading to the consolidation of a transnational Indian middle class, and how migration shapes migrants’ understanding of what it means to be educated.

My doctoral research, builds on ‘in-’ and ‘out-of school’ ethnographies of two schools in urban Kerala. In it, I bring together anthropological literature on globalization and middle-class cultural practice in south Asia; literature on children and youth; and sociological research on schools as sites of social reproduction, and cultural production. I unpack both the capacities of contemporary Indian private schooling to reproduce caste, class and gender inequalities, while simultaneously allowing space for active ways in which youth and their families appropriate and reproduce emergent educational aspirations, strategies and investments.

 

Teaching Areas

 

  • Politics of Identity
  • Critical Thinking
  • History of the UAE

 

 

Newman, A., Hannah Hoechner, and David Sancho (2019). Constructions of the ‘educated person’ in the context of mobility, migration and globalization, Globalisation, Societies and Education.

Sancho, D (2020 forthcoming). ‘Facing life together’: Everyday friendship and well-being among Indian Youth in Dubai. In E. Buscemi & I. Kaposi (Eds.) Everyday Youth Cultures in the Gulf Peninsula. London. Routledge.