Lecture - Resistance Studies Initiative

Resistance Studies Initiative Fall Speaker Series: 
Distinguished researchers and activists share critical reflections on resistance issues.​

Gaurav J. Pathania is a sociologist of higher education and his area of specialization includes identity movement and student politics. His current research projects applies insights from cultural sociology to understand social movements and critically examines contemporary student activism around issues of caste, race and regional identity. Along with several research papers and reviews, Pathania authored his first book, The University as a Site of Resistance: Identity and Student Politics (Oxford University Press, 2018). The book conceptualizes the conditions for the emergence of cultural politics and resistance in Indian higher education. Gaurav has a PhD from Jawaharlal Nehru University, India.

Dr. Pathania has been a visiting scholar at UMass Amherst and at the University of Southern California. He currently teaches in the Dept.of Sociology in George Washington University. He is also an award winning poet. He is currently writing his memoir of growing up in a village in pre-globalization India. 

Book Description:The university has emerged as a key site of dissent, cultural resistance, ideologies and political expression of collective identities. This book provides an ethnographic account of recent student unrest in Indian university campuses and explores in detail India’s prolonged student movement - the movement for Telangana statehood that was spearheaded by  university students in Hyderabad. The book chronicles contemporary student resistance and analyzes protest methods, strategies, networks, the role of various caste and sub-caste groups, and civil society organizations in the struggle for social justice to envision a new cultural politics. It raises a conceptual debate on “New Social Movements,” nationalism, and processes of democratization of educational spaces.

Discussants: 
Stellan Vinthagen, Inaugural Endowed Chair of Nonviolent Action & Civil Resistance, UMass Amherst
Vamsi Vakulabharanam, Associate Professor of Economics, UMass Amherst
Sangeeta Kamat, Professor of Education, UMass Amherst

Co sponsored by ACE (the Alliance for Critical Education)

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