Farah Basit

In Pakistan, discussions of gender, sexuality, and female body are structured through moral languages of sharam (shame) and izzat (honor). My dissertation, Pedagogies of Shame: Comparative Ethnography of Gender and Moral Formation in Lahore Girls’ Schools, examines how these moral logics are produced and transmitted through schooling. While education is imagined as a path to empowerment, schools also discipline gender and reproduce moral hierarchies (Adely 2012). Through long-term ethnographic fieldwork across three class-stratified girls’ secondary schools (public, low-cost, elite private), I explore how teachers, curricula, and school routines regulate speech, dress, behavior, notions of izzat/sharam — and how girls internalize, reinterpret, or resist these expectations. Drawing on anthropologies of affect, gender, morality, and education, I conceptualize shame not merely as emotion but as pedagogy: a means through which femininity and social boundaries are taught and embodied. Methods include participant-observation, interviews, focus-groups, and participatory activities such as PhotoVoice, collaborative mapping, and affective diaries. The project offers one of the first comparative ethnographies of class-stratified schools in Pakistan, illuminating how institutions teach moral personhood. It advances feminist and educational anthropology by revealing how shame functions as moral curriculum — and how girls transform it into new possibilities for voice, safety, and dignity.