This book looks at educational institutions and their role as sites of learning in times of moral and political chaos. It highlights the erosion of critical pedagogical traditions in universities in India and registers the ongoing responses and struggles as educational experiences. This book develops a critical approach by redefining education from the perspective of learning as a political act to experience the complex network of learning activities beyond the confines of educational institutions. It also locates caste, gender and religious hierarchies in schools and universities in India. The book explores the extremely contradictory experiences of academic spaces that have resulted in the development of uncharted sites of learning. Being mindful of these multiple strands, the authors examine the culture of learning and reflect on the space for critical learning, activism, dissent and self-reflexivity in schools and universities in India. The goal of diverse experiences of learning is to derive new meaning to the conceptions of critical pedagogy as a political act for democratising education. This transdisciplinary book will be of interest to students and researchers of education, sociology, history, political studies and public policy.

Since the early 1990s hundreds of thousands of Tamil villagers in southern India have participated in literacy lessons, science demonstrations, and other events designed to transform them into active citizens with access to state power. These efforts to spread enlightenment among the oppressed are part of a movement known as the Arivoli Iyakkam (the Enlightenment Movement), considered to be among the most successful mass literacy movements in recent history. In The Light of Knowledge, Francis Cody’s ethnography of the Arivoli Iyakkam highlights the paradoxes inherent in such movements that seek to emancipate people through literacy when literacy is a power-laden social practice in its own right. The Light of Knowledge is set primarily in the rural district of Pudukkottai in Tamil Nadu, and it is about activism among laboring women from marginalized castes who have been particularly active as learners and volunteers in the movement. In their endeavors to remake the Tamil countryside through literacy activism, workers in the movement found that their own understanding of the politics of writing and Enlightenment was often transformed as they encountered vastly different notions of language and imaginations of social order. Indeed, while activists of the movement successfully mobilized large numbers of rural women, they did so through logics that often pushed against the very Enlightenment rationality they hoped to foster. Offering a rare behind-the-scenes look at an increasingly important area of social and political activism, The Light of Knowledge brings tools of linguistic anthropology to engage with critical social theories of the postcolonial state.

In this major book Martha Nussbaum, one of the most innovative and influential philosophical voices of our time, proposes a kind of feminism that is genuinely international, argues for an ethical underpinning to all thought about development planning and public policy, and dramatically moves beyond the abstractions of economists and philosophers to embed thought about justice in the concrete reality of the struggles of poor women. Nussbaum argues that international political and economic thought must be sensitive to gender difference as a problem of justice, and that feminist thought must begin to focus on the problems of women in the third world. Taking as her point of departure the predicament of poor women in India, she shows how philosophy should undergird basic constitutional principles that should be respected and implemented by all governments, and used as a comparative measure of quality of life across nations.