Philosophies of Transformative Practice (Social Movements in India)

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Philosophies of Transformative Practice: Social Movements in India is the result of the efforts of the members of the Association of Christian Philosophers of India (ACPI) to engage themselves in philosophizing, a bold attempt at making philosophy into a tool of liberation of society, bringing it down from the realm of the Ideal to the Real. The fruits of this venture have been gathered in this edited volume, containing twenty-two well- researched contributions, with liberative praxis as their thrust, and social movements as their loci of grounded reflection and critical enquiry.

The first cluster of six essays, of an archaeological nature, stresses the fact that social movements are to be prophetic and sapiential, able to be speaking wisdom and truth to power, caring for the human, daring the culture of death, and reinventing themselves as agents of life for the peoples especially at the periphery, thereby challenging dominant models of development. The second cluster of five articles is genealogical in nature, foregrounding dialectical factors which lie beneath the events or the insurrection of knowledge(s), which trigger the origin and the trajectory of social movements. The third and the last cluster of contributions, eleven in number, is about the Programmatic and the Pragmatic of social movements in India. They examine the various ways in which these movements constantly challenge the prevalent monocultural and hegemonic ideologies, deploying religious and social capital, accrued through dialogue between religions, between religion and science, and through ecological citizenship and conversion.

This attempt at elaborating the philosophies of transformative practice in the company of social movements resonates with the echoes of a new politics of dissent and difference(s), towards reweaving democracy in India, as a cultural space where a hundred different voices could bloom, in equality, freedom, and fraternity.

Dr Jose D. Maliekal SDB holds a doctorate in Subaltern Fundamental Theology from the Department of Christian Studies, School of Philosophy and Religious Studies, University of Madras. He is the co- editor of the volume entitled, Hermeneutics: Truth or/and Meaning? (1994) and The Struggle for the Past: Historiographies Today (2002). He has also authored a book named Standstill Utopias? Dalits Encountering Christianity (2017), which won the James Massey Subaltern Studies Award from ISPCK, Delhi. At present, he is the academic coordinator at St John's Regional Seminary (Institute of Philosophy, Religious Studies and Social Sciences) Kondadaba, Vizianagaram District, Andhra Pradesh, where he teaches systematic philosophy and social praxis. He brings to his long career as a teacher of philosophy a transdisciplinary approach. His areas of research include subaltern perspectives on the production of knowledge, Dalit identities and empowerment, and the impact of religion on socio-economic transformation.

**Contents and Sample Pages**