Dip Kapoor

Subaltern Social Movement (SSM) Post-Mortems of Development in India: Locating Trans-Local Activism and Radicalism

This paper expounds on an Adivasi-Dalit subalternist critique of development and compulsory modernization drawn from a participatory critical-interpretive case study developed from several episodic engagements with these groups between 2006 and 2009 in Orissa, India. This critique is advanced by the Lok Adhikar Manch (LAM), a trans-local movement network of 13 subaltern social movement groups in Orissa. These disclosures are then deployed in a critical conversation with a specific strain of Marxist scholarship in peasant studies that dismisses subaltern movements as conservative (status-quo politics in relation to capital) and as scattered anti-Marxist postmodern populisms that fail to challenge the reproduction of capitalist control of the rural hinterlands.

Re-Politicizing Participatory Action Research: Unmasking Neoliberalism and the Illusions of Participation.

Utilizing potential cross-pollinations of theoretical insights taken from approaches to educational and social research that have mostly emerged outside of the university and been generated by critical theorists and most recently indigenous researchers as work that has not only challenged the epistemological and ontological foundations of the Western social science canon but have systematically contested the coloniality of neoliberal globalization in policy and practice, the primary purpose of the paper is to foreground the contributions that these critical perspectives can bring to reconceptualizing participatory action research (PAR) as a vehicle for energizing social networks that are anti-capitalist and anti-colonial. First, the paper outlines some of the key principles that have guided the development of critical or radical approaches to PAR methodology and practice over the past five decades. We then move onto discuss the impact of neoliberal thought on educational and social research in the contemporary era. In particular, we focus on the way in which it has infiltrated and reorganized the knowledge producing practices of academic institutions by closely aligning them with the ‘value-chain’ and commercialization of knowledge. The third section of the paper explores possibilities for reinvigorating PAR as a specifically anti-hegemonic project for challenging neoliberal and colonial ideological modes of thought in educational and social research. Three approaches are considered for their potential to contribute to a theory of PAR as a network-building methodology. The final section offers some concluding remarks and reflections on the arguments that have been advanced in the paper.

Learning and Knowledge Production in Dalit Social Movements in Rural India

The genesis of the Indian caste system can be traced back to 1500 BC and the ancient Hindu Vedic scriptures, wherein the sixth and tenth Mandatas of the Purushasukta hymn in the Rig Veda defines the four varnas as Brahmanas who came from his mouth (keepers of sacred knowledge and rituals), Kshatriyas from his arms (warriors and protectors), Vaishyas from his thighs (traders and farmers), and Shudras who came from his feet (menial labor). Dalits had no place in this religio-social scheme and are referred to as Avarna (outside/outcaste), Dasa, and Dasyus (servants), relegated to performing polluted and polluting tasks such as sewage disposal, tanning of hides, and the removal of carrion and refuse. The Chandogya Upanishads (800–600 BC) clarifies this scheme further and refers to the said castes, and also compares Chandalas (outcastes) with dogs and swine in Khanda 10, verse 7. The Ramayana, a significant holy book for Hindus, speaks of Lord Rama’s rule (Ram rajya), during which only the three upper castes are allowed to do tapasya (penance and meditation) to attain divinity and dignity. Lord Rama, on learning that a Shudra had undertaken tapasya, killed him for being so presumptuous—one could only infer what might have happened had it been a Dalit/outcaste. Hindu scriptures such as the Mahabharat and the Puranas make reference to Dalits as monkeys (banaras), bears (bhalukas), and demons (asuras).

Human Rights as Paradox and Equivocation in Contexts of Adivasi (original dweller) Dispossession in India

This paper advances the proposition that a dialectical appreciation of the politics of state-institutionalized human rights in colonial and neoliberal hegemonic (imperial) contexts helps to shed light on why Adivasi facing development displacement and dispossession are unlikely to advance their political and existential interests through recourse to an estatized human rights mechanism embedded in global and national political and economic structures imbricated in the historical projects of colonialism and imperialism (globalization of capitalism). Adivasi social movement inspired ‘human rights’ (and related conceptions) informed by an anti-colonial/imperial project that transgress these trajectories continue to provide the primary political impetus for asserting the continued place of Adivasi (see Kapoor, 2011 for an elaboration on such assertions). The paper is informed by funded research into ‘Learning in Adivasi social movements in eastern India’ (2006–2009), the author’s relationship with Adivasi and rural movements/activism in this region since the early 1990s, and secondary literature addressing the politics of human rights in Adivasi contexts of development displacement and dispossession.

Gendered-Caste Violations and the Cultural Politics of Voice in Rural Orissa, India

Despite the legal ban on untouchability over four decades ago, caste discrimination and atrocities perpetrated against ‘untouchable’ women (or Dalits) continue to be a part of the social landscape in India. Based on a decade-long partnership between a Canadian NGO, a partner Dalit/Adivasi local organization and 75 partner villages in South Orissa, this article provides a localized snapshot of the contemporary nature of caste atrocities committed against Dalit women in the Mohana administrative block. It briefly elaborates on Dalit explanations for such assaults and suggests that when it comes to addressing gendered-caste victimization, there are limits to open democratic advocacy which need to be acknowledged by activists and critical scholarship engaged with the cultural politics of ‘voice’.

Adult learning in political (un-civil) society: Anti-colonial subaltern^ social movement (SSM) pedagogies of place

Abstract Through a selective deployment of conceptualisations from subaltern studies, in particular the concepts of political (un-civil) society and an autonomous domain (or a peoples politics that suggests the plausibility of dominance without hegemony), this article distinguishes a subaltern social movement (SSM) formation and related anti-colonial SSM pedagogies of place in rural eastern India (Orissa), from Euro-American cartographies of social movements and learning and their varied liberal-capitalist and/or collective-socialist political commitments to modernisation, industrialisation, development, globalisation and progress. The historical resilience and contemporary proliferation of SSM pedagogies in the age of empire is instructive for similar trans/local movements and anti-colonial and anti-capitalist projects of adult learning in imperial and colonial societies implicated in a politics of capitalist hegemony. The propositions advanced here are based on the authors practical and research involvements with Adivasi (original dweller) and Dalit (untouchable out-castes) SSMs since the early 1990s and a funded research engagement (2006–2009) pertaining to ‘Learning in Adivasi social movements’ in India.

Introduction: International Perspectives on Education, PAR, and Social Change

As globalist euphoria, market triumphalism despite recent vulnerabilities and hypermodernizing political, cultural, educational, and linguistic projects define the dominant accents of this historical juncture, academics and knowledge/pedagogical workers continue to deliberate on our contributions to education, research, and to knowledge processes. More importantly, for those of us who view such engagements as being fundamentally political, we critically assess the import of synergies between research, knowledge, education, and social action in relation to the dominant epistemic conceptions and political-economic interests of our time. Recognizing that all research and socioeducational inquiry begins from a social location and that research being conducted by those who are located with and for power, will produce knowledge useful for the purposes of ruling relations and the reinforcement of existing hierarchies of culture and material existence (for instance, “western empiricism reifies the conventional values legitimating capitalist society” Antonio, 1981, p. 381), it is incumbent on others to democratize and decolonize these constructions (Fanon, 1961; Freire, 1970; Nandy, 1987; Nkrumah, 1964; Smith, 1999) and take a standpoint outside the relations of ruling (Smith, 2005). We need to be clear about whose standpoint we are taking and why, whose questions need to be addressed and what for and then write with responsibility toward those for whom we claim to write.

Global Perspectives on Adult Education: An Introduction

It is generally assumed that adult education involves select recon-structions of one’s life needs and possibilities relative to the world inwhich one resides at a given time and with respect to specific changes in the sociopolitical, economic, and technological lives of societies. Also located in the realm of adult education is the andragogical assumption regarding the adult learner’s greater level of voluntarism and autonomy in the learning undertaking. As pointed out by Julius Nyerere (1968), whose brand of postcolonial adult education for self-reliance in Tanzania was unique in many ways, every adult education learner knows something, not only about the demands of the context in which the desire for more learning is created, but also about the subject that she or he is interested in, even when the learner may not be aware of that a priori knowledge. In terms of global perspectives on adult education (the focus of this collection), global discussions, analysis, and approaches should be informed by the situational characteristics of each locale and by extension, should pay attention to what can be shared with other adult education programs and nonprogrammatic adult learning throughout the world. Additionally, teaching and research in global and international adult education always contains an element of comparison, as our understanding of each new initiative persuades us to see it in relation to what exists around its instructional borders.

Political Society and Subaltern Social Movements (SSM) in India: Implications for Development/ Global Education

This chapter suggests that development education (DE) [also when discussed in relation to Global/Citizenship Education (G/CE)] in Canada and potentially in the ‘First World’ (imperial societies), could benefit from radical democratisation in terms of the potential range of relevant source(s) of knowledge(s), experience(s), analyses and teleological/ political possibilities that DE has strenuously avoided, ignored or remained suspiciously oblivious of, to date (e.g. from indigenous and development-displaced/dispossessed people’s rural movements referenced here as Subaltern Social Movements [SSMs] — see Table 13.1 for a network of rural movements or the Lok Adhikar Manch [LAM] in the east-coast state of Orissa, India). DE needs to consider the possibilities of a critical dialectical approach which engages/exposes various contradictions unleashed by the Euro-American development project, including the imbrication of the development project in the continued exercise of a coloniality of power (Quijano, 2000). This would require problematising the Euro-uni-versal conception of development by engaging pluri-versal conceptions (and what lies in-between), as is often forwarded by anti-colonial/capitalist SSMs (Kapoor, 2011a, 2013a) in different time-space and onto-epistemic locations (Zibechi, 2005; Meyer and Alvarado, 2010; Zibechi and Ramon, 2012).

Anti-Colonial Subaltern Social Movement (SSM) Learning and Development Dispossession in India

This chapter considers the significance of a selective reading of subaltern studies for informing and understanding SSM political formations and anti-colonial SSM pedago gies of place (Kapoor, 2009a) in contexts of development-displacement and disposses sion of Adivasis and Dalits in the state of Orissa, India.