Specialization

Philosophy and Sociology of Education

Email

kaustuv.roy@thapar.edu

Kaustuv Roy earned his Ph.D from Michigan State University, USA, and has worked for many years as faculty both in India and abroad. His basic degree is in Mathematics and he holds a diploma in art. His areas of interests include Recovery of classical and vernacular knowledge in education; Discovery of positive relation between physical and intellectual labour; Non-Western foundations of curriculum and pedagogy; Pedagogy in minimalist settings; and connection between art and education. His work has been mentioned and cited over 1000 times.

PUBLICATIONS

Books

• Reincarnating Experience in Education: A Pedagogy of the Twice-Born (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020). ISBN 978-3-030-53547-6

  Rejecting the one-dimensionality of contemporary education that is primarily mind-oriented, this book presents authentic educational experience as the actualization of a potential within a phenomenological field whose axes consist of the somatic, the psychic, and the symbolic. The author insists on the nature of experiencing as coming to be in a living tension between the intuition and the intellect, or the inner and the outer, and calls the resultant disclosure a pedagogy of the twice-born. The educated must be born twice: the first time we are involuntarily thrust into a commonsensical world; the second birth is a deliberate step toward a qualitative principle.

• Teachers and Teaching: Time and the Creative Tension (New York: Macmillan, 2019), ISBN 978-3-030-24669-3; DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-24670-9.

  Against the backdrop of a historical debate between science and philosophy with regard to the nature of time, this book argues that our commonsense understanding of time is inadequate—especially for education. Teachers’ work is heavily imbued with the effects of clock time, and yet there is another time—duration—which remains out of sight precisely because our sights are filled with temporal things and projections of futurality. The book includes philosophical discussions of time using the work of thinkers from Augustine to Eckhart, from Paul to Aquinas, and Einstein to Bergson, in its quest for a creative time.

• Education and the Ontological Question: Addressing a Missing Dimension (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019). ISBN 978-3-030-11177-9; DOI 10.1007/978-3-030-11178-6.

  This book identifies and expands upon the link between ontology and education, exposing a lack of ontological inquiry as the vital missing element in the study and practice of modern education today. In this book, Roy aims to reintroduce ontological thinking and reasoning that grounds historical and modern educational understandings and practice. Beginning with a historical perspective, he then turns to examine the results of his scholarship into practical concerns of education such as language, dialogue, and curriculum: ultimately proposing a new way forward emphasizing a balance in the education effort between epistemic content and ontological disclosure.

• The Power of Philosophy: Thought and Redemption (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019). ISBN 978-3-030-07269-8.

  This book explores the possibility of philosophical praxis by weaving an ontological thread through four principal thinkers: Heidegger, Schelling, Goethe, and Heraclitus. It argues that a special kind of redemptive power awaits the structural understanding of thought that is beyond semantic formations such as concepts and ideational systems. The author claims that the “power” is negative in nature, trans-personal, and derived directly from the understanding of thought as a structural pulse. The book travels backwards in time, encountering successively Heidegger’s critique of calculative thinking, Schelling’s Mind/Nature relation, Goethe’s Delicate Empiricism, and the aphoristic wisdom of Heraclitus in search of a redemptive power. The author refers to the praxis as "philosophical bilingualism".

• Limits of the Secular: Social Experience and Cultural Memory (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). ISBN-13: 978-3319839974.

  This book facilitates a missing dialogue between the secular and the transsecular dimensions of human existence. It explores two kinds of limits of the secular: the inadequacies of its assumptions with respect to the total being of the human, and how it curbs the ontological sensibilities of the human. Roy argues that since secular reason of modernity can only represent the empirical dimension of existence, humans are forced to privatize the non-empirical dimension of being. It is therefore absent from the social, imaginary, as well as public discourse. This one-sidedness is the root cause of many of the ills facing modernity. Roy contends that a bridge-consciousness that praxeologically relates the secular and the non-secular domains of experience is the need of the hour.

• Rethinking Curriculum in Times of Shifting Educational Context (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). ISBN-13: 978-3319870069.

  This book engages with the dynamic intersection of several domains such as philosophy, psychology, sociology, and pedagogy, in order to critically analyze and reinvent our understanding of curriculum. The chapters raise important questions such as: what are the conditions of possibility for a living curriculum in which Eros and intellect (or reason and intuition) are not separated? How is it possible to escape ideology that keeps us bound to defunct categories? What are the ingredients of an inquiry that is able to grasp curriculum as an expanding interpersonal movement? How do the teacher-learner ensemble get creatively constituted beyond obstructive dualities? How can we reinvent meaning in curriculum without totalization? Which indigenous understandings can be recovered in order to reinvent curriculum with greater relevance for diverse peoples? This volume addresses elements of reason, nonreason, becoming, dissipation, violence, uncertainty, transcendence, love, and death in order to come to a critical understanding of the relationship between knowledge and knower from these multiple perspectives.

• Technohumanism, Global Crises, and Education: Toward a Posthumanist Pedagogy (Forthcoming in Macmillan 2020).

  The book begins by arguing that the core ideas of humanism were essentially “junk bonds”—quick yielding but ultimately defaulting and leading to bankruptcy. Developed for quick take-over of available evolutionary spaces through various kinds of cognitive-narrative-maneuvers, the solipsistic navel-gazing merely consolidated narcissistic predilections. Second, post-humanistic analysis clearly shows that the reflexive label “human” creates at least two problems: the production of a petty morality (noted by Nietzsche) that suffocates creative life, and the bonding of the epiphenomenal into a composite image (noted by Spinoza) that prevents authentic becoming. Together they keep our eyes diverted from the nature of our ontological truths. Within this larger theoretical arc, the book argues that among other things, the Covid-19 crisis poignantly destabilizes the root narratives that we have for so long told ourselves. The shock that the world is currently experiencing is due to the unreality we have surrounded ourselves with rather than anything unique in actual experience. Finally, the book suggests an educational path for a different kind of future away from technological hubris.

• Teachers in Nomadic Spaces: Deleuze and Curriculum (New York: Peter Lang, 2003). ISBN-13: 978-0820467375

  Teachers in Nomadic Spaces is fieldwork in curriculum theory, weaving vital strands of Gilles Deleuze"s constructivist philosophy into a case study of teacher induction and becoming in an urban innovative school. Releasing the productive power of difference, it allows us to see the pedagogical potential of irregular (nomadic) spaces and thereby to obtain release from the Platonic pincer-hold of curriculum as recovery and representation. This book offers a conceptual mode for recomposing ourselves into new expressions in education by means of semiotic and affective experimentation, and will appeal to teachers, teacher educators, curriculum developers, those interested in urban issues in education, and Deleuzians.

• Neighborhoods of the Plantation: War, Politics, and Education (The Netherlands: Sense Publishers, 2008). ISBN-13: 978-9087904333

  The plantation is present day slave society, a means and a system of usurpation of life energies and bodily productive capacities in the service of endless bankruptcy on the one hand and elite persuasions on the other. The book argues, in part, that war or State organized violence is one of the most efficient means of the elite transfer; the wreckage through war and destruction of ordinary livability opens up the human as organic compounds in the turning of human life into global plantation assets. More importantly, the book argues that this is possible only by means of certain ontological and epistemological deployments that make war on the human-ecological inevitable and even acceptable. This is where pedagogy comes in. The temporal being, the spatial being, and the linguistic being of the human-ecological are explored as three dimensions of captivity as well as the means of escape.