In this post, the new member of the editorial board, Aditi Arur, introduces themself and says a little about why they’ve gotten involved.

I sometimes think that the field of careers education and guidance chose me more than I did the field. For starters, my own career path hasn’t followed a straight, linear trajectory which in many ways goes against conventional wisdom in career guidance to “choose” a certain path. I taught Pharmacology in a medical college for four years until I changed my discipline and career to do a Ph.D. program in Comparative and International Development Education from the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities in 2009. My interest then was to figure out how medical education may foster intercultural education, and found myself inclined towards anti-oppressive pedagogies and sociocultural theories of learning. This interest morphed into a persistent desire to “trouble” different subjects and disciplines with a social justice perspective. My work in a careers education firm that serves largely middle-class to elite schools from 2016 to 2019, One Step Up Educational Services, employed this troublemaking approach in teaching about careers and employability skills from feminist, queer, and peace studies perspectives among others. This troublemaking became possible in a space that was outside the confines and constraints of the school system yet was perceived as a necessary bridge to further education and employment opportunities.

In many ways I entered this subliminal space, if you will, of career guidance in India during my Ph.D. program as part of a multi-country evaluation of a girls’ education program in 2009. Later, I was involved in three more girls’ education programs in India. All these programs were designed to mentor girls and raise their aspirations to study beyond secondary education and to get employment in the formal sector. Career counselling played a crucial role in shaping girls’ aspirations. For instance, girls often shared their desires to become teachers and sometimes police officers because of the gendered options they perceived they had through education. While these programs were impactful in many ways, as a critical feminist evaluator what concerned me was that the burden of changing unequal opportunity structures often remained on the girls themselves. It is through my writing practice in this area of work that I connected with Ronald Sultana through whom the field of career guidance for social justice opened up to me.

Why am I joining the editorial board?

My biggest motivation to joining this editorial board is to connect with a tribe that I did not know I belonged to. The area of career guidance for social justice brings together people who are plagued, like I am, with similar questions and issues. Volunteering to promote a dialogue on these questions and issues on this website is an opportunity for me to learn from practitioners and scholars within India and globally, to belong to a community that is interested in similar issues, and most importantly to advocate for the crucial role that careers educators and guidance practitioners can play for social justice.