Beyond Domesticity: Reimagining Home Science Education for Safe and Equitable Homes: 2026

Home Science education in India has historically evolved within a colonial context, where the dominant nationalist discourse evoked the patriarchal ethos to focus on women's roles as caregivers. Simultaneously, however, the colonial women's movement realised its emancipatory potential, setting the stage for the developments in the field. In post-colonial India, although the discipline integrates scientific knowledge into everyday household management and emphasises employability, it is gradually depoliticized, confining education to technical and managerial domains. This work critically interrogates these pedagogical limitations of Home Science education, repositioning the home as a contested site in which power dynamics operate to subjugate women. Using a qualitative and feminist methodological approach, this work contends that Domestic Science must respond to contemporary challenges, including gender-based violence in homes. It must move beyond skill training to foster critical consciousness, advance constitutional, legal, digital, and financial literacy, and raise awareness about reproductive health rights. Drawing on rights-based, feminist praxis and critical pedagogy, this work proposes a comprehensive, Gender-Equity-Based Transformative and Just (GETJ) framework, reimagining Home Science education as a site of social transformation. Aimed at educators, researchers, scholars, and policy makers, it seeks to reclaim the original progressive and emancipatory feminist spirit of Home Science by aligning it with contemporary global commitments to human rights and gender justice. In a patriarchal world, this work suggests that this discipline can become a tool to visualise kitchens, bedrooms, and living rooms as democratic spaces, fostering equality and justice. The goal is to ensure that the discipline serves as a tool to build safe homes, democratic societies, and a just and equitable world.

Pagina's: 96, Paperback, Independently published