About
Dr Achala Gupta is a lecturer in Southampton Education School at the University of Southampton. Achala is a member of the editorial board of the British Sociological Association's flagship journal, Sociology.
Achala is a sociologist of education and has published research articles on social class and educational privilege, heterogeneity of middle-class advantage, teacher-entrepreneurialism, as well as timescape, social legitimacy, the shadowing process of, and mothers' subscription to, private tutoring in India. Achala has also contributed to the higher education literature by exploring how students are socially constructed in Denmark, England, Ireland, Germany, Poland, and Spain.
Affiliations:
Centre for Research in Inclusion
Leadership, effective education and policy
The India Centre for Inclusive Growth and Sustainable Development
KEY ROLES
At the University of Southampton:
- Co-director, Centre for Research in Inclusion | University of Southampton (March 2024 - present)
- Programme coordinator, Southampton Education School Research Seminar Series (January 2023 - present)
- Ethics Reviewer for research conducted by students and staff in the Faculty of Social Sciences (July 2021-March 2024)
- Academic Integrity Officer (BSc, PGCE primary and secondary, MSc Army programmes) for the Southampton Education School (July 2021-August 2022)
Associations:
- UK’s Higher Education Academy
- British Educational Research Association
- UKRI Early-career Forum
- Council for European Studies
- Comparative and International Education Society
- European Sociological Association
- British Sociological Association
Research
Research groups
Research interests
- Sociology of education
- Shadow education
- Educational inequality
- Social mobility
- Comparative research
Current research
Achala’s research focuses on investigating educational issues sociologically. Her current interests include education delivery systems (formal and supplementary) and schooling practices in Asia, and students’ aspirations and transition into higher education in Europe.
Key publications
1. on schooling, parenting, teacher identity and shadow education in India:
- Gupta, A. (2023). Revisiting educational advantage and social class: A Bourdieusian analysis of middle-class parents’ investment in private schooling and shadow education. British Journal of Sociology of Education. DOI: 10.1080/01425692.2022.2126824. [Link]
- Gupta, A. (2023). The nature and scope of English private tutoring: an analysis of the shadowing process and middle-class identity in globalising India. In K. Yung & A. Hajar (Eds.) International Perspectives on English Private Tutoring: Theories, Practices and Policies, Hong Kong: Palgrave Macmillan. [Link]
- Gupta, A. (2022). Middle-class mothers’ participation in tutoring for spoken English: A case of unlocking middle-class identity and privilege in contemporary India. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education. DOI: 10.1080/01596306.2022.2131738. [Link]
- Gupta, A. (2022). A ‘Shadow education’ timescape: An empirical investigation of the temporal arrangement of private tutoring vis-à-vis formal schooling in India. British Journal of Educational Studies. DOI: 10.1080/00071005.2021.2024137. [Link]
- Gupta, A. (2022). Social legitimacy of private tutoring: an investigation of institutional and affective educational practices in India. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education. 43(4), 571-584. [Link]
- Gupta, A. (2021) Exposing the ‘shadow’: An empirical scrutiny of the ‘shadowing process’ of private tutoring in India, Educational Review. DOI: 10.1080/00131911.2021.1931038. [Link]
- Gupta, A. (2021). Teacher-entrepreneurialism: A case of teacher identity formation in neoliberalizing education space in contemporary India. Critical Studies in Education, 62(4), 422-438. [Link]
- Gupta, A. (2020). Heterogeneous middle-class and disparate educational advantage: parental investment in their children’s schooling in Dehradun, India, British Journal of Sociology of Education, 41(1), 48-63. [Link]
2. on education policy enactments (Double Burden Reduction policy) in China:
- Gupta, A. & Zhao, X. (2023). Teachers’ work under responsibilising policies: An analysis of educators’ views on China’s 2021 educational reforms. Journal of Education Policy. DOI: 10.1080/02680939.2023.2236067. [Link]
3. on constructing higher education students in European countries (England, Ireland, Germany, Denmark, Poland and Spain):
- Brooks, R., Gupta, A., Jayadeva, A., Lainio, A. and Lazetic, P. (2022) Constructing the Higher Education Student: Perspectives from across Europe, Bristol, Policy Press. [Link]
- Gupta, A., Brooks, R. and Abrahams, J. (2023). Higher education students as consumers: A cross-country comparative analysis of students’ views in Europe. Compare: A Journal of Comparative and International Education. DOI: 10.1080/03057925.2023.2234283. [Link]
- Brooks, R., Gupta, A., Jayadeva, S., Abrahams, J., & Lažetić, P. (2021). Students as political actors? Similarities and differences across six European nations. British Educational Research Journal, 46(6), 1193-1209. [Link]
- Brooks, R., Gupta, A., Jayadeva, S., Abrahams, J. (2021). Students’ views about the purpose of higher education: a comparative analysis of six European countries. Higher Education Research & Development, 40(7), 1375-1388. [Link]
- Brooks, R., Abrahams, J., Gupta, A., Jayadeva, S. & Lažetić, P. (2021). Higher education timescapes: temporal understandings of students and learning. Sociology, 55(5), 995-1014. [Link]
- Brooks, R., Gupta, A., Jayadeva, S. (2021) Higher education students’ aspirations for their post-university lives: evidence from six European nations, Children’s Geographies (Special Issue: ‘The Place of Aspirations’: Young People’s Socio-spatial (Im)mobilities). DOI: 10.1080/14733285.2021.1934403. [Link]
Research projects
Active projects
Publications
Teaching
Dr Achala Gupta teaches various modules across undergraduate and postgraduate programmes at Southampton Education School:
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BSc Education (2021-present) |
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MSc Education (Army) (2021 and 2022 cohorts) |
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MSc Education |
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Achala leads the MSc Education Module, Education and Society, previously known as The Social Context of Education and Lifelong Learning (2022-23-present) and BSc Education and Education Psychology module, Internationalisation and Education (2023-24-present).
She also supervises and examines BSc, MSc and MSc Army, and PhD dissertations on topics concerning educational inequalities, shadow education, and international students.
External roles and responsibilities
Biography
Dr Achala Gupta is a lecturer at Southampton Education School, University of Southampton.
Before joining the University of Southampton, Achala worked as a Research Fellow (at UCL Institute of Education and the University of Surrey) on an ERC-funded Eurostudents project (led by Professor Rachel Brooks). This comparative study aimed to investigate the various ways in which students are made sense of within the European higher education sector.
Before joining the Eurostudents project team, Achala was based at the Asia Research Institute in the National University of Singapore as a Research Associate on another comparative project that focused on Global Asian Universities and International Students’ Mobilities (in Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Taiwan, and China).
Achala’s doctoral research was an institutional ethnography that examined practices in the formal education system from the vantage point of private tutoring (‘shadow education’) in contemporary India (see, Gupta, 2019; 2020; 2021 for discussions on this topic).
Prizes
- 2020 the British Journal of Sociology of Education Best Early Career Article (shortlisted) (2020)
- 2024 CIES Higher Education SIG’s Best Book Award (2024)