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Chetan Anand

Biography

Chetan is a part of the MA in Education Programme.

Chetan’s research currently focuses on how urban processes shape the experiences of education for children in the margins of the city. In this regard he has been doing and anchoring a collaborative fieldwork with other colleagues in a slum in South-Delhi, India.

Chetan is finishing his PhD from Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai and finished his MPhil from the same. His MPhil thesis was titled ‘Marginality, Schooling and Violence: A Study of School in Delhi’. His PhD thesis is titled ‘Education, Marginality and Exclusion: An Ethnographic Study of an Urban Slum’. He has finished his MA Linguistics from University of Delhi. Before joining Azim Premji university, he has worked in different colleges of University of Delhi teaching courses in language and linguistics, in B.El.Ed and B.Ed. since 2015.

As an ethnographer he seeks to explore how subjectivity is mediated with language and in what ways language shapes experiences in different spheres of life. His work with children in a slum asks how urban landscape is shaped by the choices and aspirations of children and in what power-matrix children experience the world in which these choices and aspirations are lived. He is further interested in exploring in what ways state through its various institutional apparatuses and law is experienced at the margins and in what ways informality of the slum shapes the experience of education in the slum. Other questions that interest him are how is law experienced in the slums? How do we understand law’s separation from justice in its experience in the everyday life of children in the slums? What does this different experience constitute of and in what ways this arbitrary experience of law contributes to how cities are evolving today?

His work is sensitive towards ways in which epistemological paradigms translate to an understanding of everyday life, and he seeks to explore what one finds at the limits of this translation. He finds that philosophical concepts can find everyday life opaque and closed, ordinary language and ethics can be walls that block philosophical inquiry to be a meaningful site of investigation, ethnography here is a student of life and the gesture of listening to the other is critical and then in a different moment philosophical concepts again become a site that is productive for translations between the philosophical inquiry and everyday life and a different kind of speech emerges from this.

Publications

Book Chapters

Anand, C. (2023). Thinking jouissance in Nietzschean negentropy. In C. Last (Ed.), Abyssal Arrows: Spiritual Leadership Inspired by Thus Spoke Zarathustra. p. 303 – 351. Philosophy Portal Books.

Anand, C. (2022). Meditations on self-consciousness in Hegel: What is at stake in our theoretical attitudes towards the world. In D. Garner, C. Last (Eds.), Enter the Alien: Thinking 21^st century Hegel. Philosophy Portal Books.

(forthcoming in 2025) Anand, C. Role of teacher in acquisition-learning debate. In M. Panda, S. Mishra, and J. Baranyi (Eds.). From Principles to Praxis: How Linguistic Theories Interact with Language Learning and Pedagogy. Springer.

Journal Articles

Anand, C. & Dalal, J. (2022). Schooling in the margins of the State: Exploring the vicissitudes of violence. Contemporary Education Dialogue, 19 (2), 1 – 28, (0973−1849). https://doi.org/10.1177/09731849221101109

Dalal, J. & Anand, C. (2022). Child at the site of protest. Social Scientist 50 (7−8), 19 – 26. https://socialscientistindia.org/current-issue/2948/

Dalal, J., Anand, C. & Tuli, M. (2022). Freud for today’s times: Predicament posed by narrow groups. The Third Concept, April 2022.

Dalal, J., Anand, C. & Tuli, M. (2021). Critique or rationality: The conundrum of modernity. Towards Excellence, Vol. 13, Issue 4, 195 – 203, 0974 – 035X.

Research Reports

Rajan, V., Dalal, J. and Anand, C. (2023). Education, Margins and City: Examining the Linkages through an Ethnographic Exploration. TESF Report. Based on research project anchored at the Indian Institute for Human Settlements (IIHS) Bangalore, funded by UKRI/ESRC.

Magazine Articles

Dalal, J., Das, R. & Anand, C. (2019). The dynamic interplay of modernity, identity and education’, The New Leam, Vol. 5 (41), 2019, 2455 – 4936. (with Jyoti Dalal and Ruchira Das)

Anand, C. (2019). Book Review of “The Ignorant School Master: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation by Jaques Ranciere”, The New Leam, June, https://www.thenewleam.com/2019/06/the-ignorant-school-master-five-lessons-in-intellectual-emancipation-by-jaques-ranciere/