School of Social Sciences

 This book not only covers the "tools of the trade" (mentoring how-to), it also examines mentoring's ancient origins since Homer's Odyssey, and peers into its future in virtual and outer space. Mentors are not born; they are mentees first and they evolve through trials and tribulations to success, to pass on their accumulated knowledge so the next generation can carry the torch yet farther. Such has been the experience of every known brilliant scientist in history.

The chapter explores the historical and contemporary entanglements of caste and capital accumulation in India, drawing mainly on sociological literature.

The gender dimension of armed conflict is marginal in the scholarship on Peace, Conflict, and Security Studies and requires further engagement through a feminist lens. It disrupts the notion that participation in these movements helps women escape patriarchy, and raises questions about the ‘ambivalent emancipation’ in India’s ‘Red Corridors.’ Through a historical and contextual reading of various resistance movements in South India and West Bengal, this paper explores how women navigate and negotiate varied socio-cultural and gender norms around women’s participation in the conflict.

The paper is a comprehensive policy review with a focus on secondary school education in India. The study provides the status of provisioning of vocational education at the school level, the success models in Indian states implementing this provision, the history and summaries of various policy trajectories culminating with the Prime Minister’s National Council on Skill Development.

The faith in the complete power of the majority leading to the first-past-the-post (FPTP) system followed in India’s electoral democracy has an inequality built into the relationship between political support and political power. Using vote shares as the measure of political support and seat shares as the extent of political power, this paper argues that due to the rather dispersed nature of votes received by regional and sub-regional level parties, the FPTP electoral system has benefited the national parties over others in terms of converting their votes to seats.

A shift towards outcome-based education (OBE) is visible in an emerging set of educational policy and regulatory documents and higher education institutions across the country. The article argues for OBE to be approached through the lens of ‘travelling theory’ to foreground the process of translation across various scales, from the transfer of policy knowledge to negotiations in the classroom.

So far research on school choice sets (decision about choosing a school from an available set of schools) has primarily regarded parents as key actors. This article emphasises that children are important actors as they inform parental decisions to co-produce certain choice sets. This paper suggest that factors like heterogeneities in social class, differential levels of religious discrimination/exclusion in schools and a need to protect their faith through education and the complex overlap between these were crucial in shaping choices. 

This chapter is part of the book Towards Inclusive Societies: Psychological and Sociological Perspectives. The volume focuses on the importance of building inclusive societies and communities for global human welfare within psychological, social, political, and cultural realms. It discusses the engagement of psychology and other social science disciplines on the need for building both cultural sensitivity and interdisciplinary dialogue. 

In many parts of the world, there is uncertainty about the diminishing quality of higher education systems. Concurrent crises have negatively impacted the well-charted policy trajectories in education (i.e., what is being taught), learning (i.e., what is being learned and how), and knowledge (i.e., what ought to be taught). Existing policy interventions primarily focus on formal spaces of learning, despite the growing recognition of informal learning, and long-standing commitments to lifelong learning.