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CIDEC Seminar

"Blackboards Beyond Battlefields: Politics, Identity, and (Re)imagining Equality in Burundi’s Post-War Schools"

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Online

In societies emerging from violent conflict, schools are often seen as the foundation for lasting peace. Yet education systems are rarely neutral. Deep inequalities within them, those shaped by ethnicity, region, gender, and class, can reinforce the very divisions that fueled war in the first place. In this talk, Dr. Emily Dunlop explores how young people in post-war Burundi interpret and experience these enduring inequalities in education, even as governments aim to rebuild and redistribute educational opportunities after conflict, and what their perspectives reveal about the promises and limits of peacebuilding through schooling. Drawing on extensive fieldwork with 114 secondary, university, and out-of-school youth, this talk examines how efforts to make education more equitable can sometimes reproduce, complicate, or even deepen perceptions of unfairness, when not paired with efforts to depoliticize previously sharp identity boundaries. Through youth narratives, she highlights the tension between institutional reforms designed to promote inclusion and the lingering social and political legacies of war that shape how those reforms are understood. Bridging research on education, identity, and post-conflict reconstruction, this talk argues that addressing educational inequality is not a simple “fix” for violence, but a long-term process requiring both political commitment and social transformation. By centering the voices of young people themselves, Dr. Dunlop offers a new framework for understanding how education can contribute to, or complicate, peacebuilding efforts in post-war contexts.


޾ֲ the Speaker

Dr. Emily Dunlop

Dr. Emily Dunlop’s work focuses on the intersections between politics and education development in conflict- and crisis-affected contexts. She studies specially how governments in post-war contexts address ethnic and regional inequalities after war, and the effects of these policies on youth, with a focus on East Africa.  As a Post-Doctoral Associate at Cornell University, she studied how to improve student learning outcomes in political science through active learning. Her work has been published in the Africa Spectrum, the International Journal of Educational DevelopmentEthnopolitics, and the Journal of Intervention in Statebuilding, and the Journal on Education in Emergencies. Dr. Dunlop is currently a Sessional Lecturer in Curriculum, Teaching, and Learning at OISE. She holds a PhD in International Education from New York University and an MA in Curriculum, Teaching, and Learning/Comparative International and Development Education from the University of Toronto.

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