Currently, a number of young people are attending schools in developing countries where there is substantial ethnic, religious, and political conflict and a striving towards social justice aims in education via the development project. There is an ongoing debate about the role of teachers in such contexts, particularly as it relates to ‘outcomes’ and success for young people as well as their capacity for realising aspirations, educational choices, and positive social futures. I engage in this thesis not only with this debate on the role of teachers, but also the larger concern with epistemic justice as it relates to the project of development (Escobar, 2011) and the modern (Bhambra, 2021). I argue that work on quality teachers and on school equity lacks several major elements: understanding the dynamic space of a classroom and the historic, local, and global forces that inform the ecological ‘field’ in which the teacher exists. I define the classroom as a ‘claimed/created space’ (Gaventa, 2006) where, willingly or unwillingly, teachers and students both wrestle with power centers and perform organic political and affective roles. Multiple definitions of the ontology of teaching exist, informed by national, local, global, and historic forces, but my work hypothesises that each teacher carries a fragmented habitus formed from the symbols and codes contained in the ‘field’ around them. In working with exclusively female teachers, I also add elements of feminist post-colonial theory including a historical debt of ‘honour/izzat,’ women as ‘borderings,’ and elements of constraint because of limited agency in the masculine nation-state (McClintock, 1995). In an urban conurbation of Karachi, Pakistan – Orangi-town – I conducted an ethnography to ‘map’ how teachers conceptualise their political role in the classroom, how the community, national, and historical influence this role, and how students perceive and respond to teachers’ authorial roles, particularly with regards to citizenship, belonging, and violence in an autocratic and militarised nation state. Methods included visual renderings, photo journals, spatial ethnography, archival research for post-colonial remnants, observations, field notes, and ethnographic interviews and focus groups with groups of children, teachers, and community members. Using the work of Ricœur (1970), Arendt (1958; 1968; 1970), and Mbembe (& Corcoran, 2019), I use hermeneutic phenomenology to interpret and understand the narrative imaginaries of community members, students, and teachers. To access the national mythos as it appears in the visual, the dialogic, and the spatial, I also turn towards a historical contextualisation which includes major themes in my findings: a state of emergence (Honig, 2009), a sacred state which is justified by borderings and ‘Others,’ glorification of the military, populist politics, and static time. In my findings, I highlight conceptions of entrapment in coloniality, what my participants call majboori, in Orangi due to historical debt (Sutoris, 2019), impoverishment, political violence, bureaucratisation, and what Mbembe refers to as ‘deathscapes’ (2019). Teachers and children illustrate their desire for self-sacrifice in service of the state, noting that while schooling and quality are significant as a moral regime, they have little impact on their aspirations. These dreams are to show their loyalty to Pakistan, where they are azaad/free. I explore the ideological closure of this state narrative as it further constricts the lives of young people on the periphery and facilitates the increased regulation, militarisation, and autocratic nature of the state. Schooling and teaching, on this periphery, are relegated to instruments of state control, with teachers functioning as (unknowing) bureaucrats and children identifying futures which are saturated with violence. I conclude this work with an examination of the political imaginaries of children, which yield potential avenues for hope, and questions surrounding the ‘colonial constitution’ (Bhambra, 2021) of modernity as it leads to ‘violent instrumentality’ and logics of the neoliberal and autocratic (Arendt, 1968).