Avijit Pathak
Showing all 11 books
This book Written with theoretical rigor, sociological sensibility and poetic beauty - reveals the intensity of classroom lectures and dialogues. In the age of 'virtual intimacy', the authror retains the courage to celebrate the spirit of direct, face-to face classroom interactions. As he delivers a series of lectures on education, pedagogy and cultural politics, and engages with his students at Jawaharlal Nehru University, the book begins to take its shape. It ...
Education has always been an arena of contestation. More so, in our times, when we are witnessing the resurgence of the debate on the meaning of education - its social objectives, its politics and ideology, and, above all, its relationship with the larger social structure. The present volume throws new light on this stimulating debate in the sociology of education. It examines the theoretical literature, reveals the socio-political history of education in India, ...
Reality is not just what is explicitly visible what statisticians measure tabulate and quantify. That is merely surface reality. Beneath it lies the deeper reality which reveals itself when the mind is without any armour when the heart opens up and when reason becomes free from all sorts of cunningness and instrumentality. Only then does music touch us and take us to the depths of our existence.
The book is full of revelations an intimate engagement with the ...
In this collection of essays--ranging from the Ayodhya episode to cricket nationalism, from terrorism to Vikram Seth--Avijit Pathak has sought to engage in a dialogic conversation with this critical mode of thinking. Pathak wants his readers to imagine and strive for a pan-Indian movement for an egalitarian, spiritually profound and ecologically senstitive society.
What characterizes contemporary sociology is its critical engagement with modernity. In Contemporary India too – especially, after the crisis of the Nehruvian agenda of nation-building – there is a critique of modernity: a critique development and sharpened by social scientists who have been influenced by Gandhism, critical theory and even postmodernity. The is book located in the context of this changing intellectual climate. By carefully examining deeply ...
Education has always been an arena of contestation. More so, in our times, when we are witnessing the resurgence of the debate on the meaning of education—its social objective, its politics and ideology, and, above all, its relationship with the larger social structure. The present volume throws new light on this stimulating debate in the sociology of education. It examines the theoretical literature, reveals the socio-political history of ...
Enough has already been said and written about modernity, globalization and identity. What, however, distinguishes the book is its reflexivity -- the politico-ethical questions in raises, and the way it makes us confront our own ambiguities and life-experiences. It uses contemporary sociological literature, negotiates with diverse sources of creative imagination, and remains immensely sensitive to the specificity of our own social reality: the trajectory of ...
This book challenges the conventional wisdom of narrowly-defined development which concentrates primarily and decisively on the 'invisible hand' of economic development per-se--a market-based money-metric approach. This book also shows the limitations of the relatively broadly-defined views on human development due to its "not-class" considerations. To the contrary, this book proposes a framework for understanding true development --development as ...