front cover of The Caste of Merit
The Caste of Merit
Engineering Education in India
Ajantha Subramanian
Harvard University Press, 2019

How the language of “merit” makes caste privilege invisible in contemporary India.

Just as Americans least disadvantaged by racism are most likely to endorse their country as post‐racial, Indians who have benefited from their upper-caste affiliation rush to declare their country post‐caste. In The Caste of Merit, Ajantha Subramanian challenges this comfortable assumption by illuminating the controversial relationships among technical education, caste formation, and economic stratification in modern India. Through in-depth study of the elite Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs)—widely seen as symbols of national promise—she reveals the continued workings of upper-caste privilege within the most modern institutions.

Caste has not disappeared in India but instead acquired a disturbing invisibility—at least when it comes to the privileged. Only the lower castes invoke their affiliation in the political arena, to claim resources from the state. The upper castes discard such claims as backward, embarrassing, and unfair to those who have earned their position through hard work and talent. Focusing on a long history of debates surrounding access to engineering education, Subramanian argues that such defenses of merit are themselves expressions of caste privilege. The case of the IITs shows how this ideal of meritocracy serves the reproduction of inequality, ensuring that social stratification remains endemic to contemporary democracies.

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front cover of Research and Practice of Active Learning in Engineering Education
Research and Practice of Active Learning in Engineering Education
Erik de Graaf, Gillian Saunders-Smits, and Michael Nieweg
Amsterdam University Press, 2005
Since 2001, the international network Active Learning in Engineering education (ALE) organized a series of international workshops on innovation of engineering education. The papers in this book are selected to reflect the state of the art, based on contributions to the 2005 ALE workshop in Holland. This overview of experiences in research and practice aims to be a source of inspiration for engineering educators. This title can be previewed in Google Books - http://books.google.com/books?vid=ISBN9789085550914.
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