Biography

 

Vishal Vasanthakumar

Vishal Vasanthakumar

  • Scholar
  • India
  • 2023 PhD Sociology
  • St Edmund's College

What does education do? What roles does education play in shaping people’s identities, values and lifeworlds? Having worked as a teacher, a political consultant and a program manager with state education departments in India, I have been keen to derive a deeper understanding of what education does. My first book, titled “The Smart and the Dumb”, takes a journalistic view of how education and culture intersect in India and is due for release in early 2023 by Penguin Randomhouse. My PhD research will focus on how elite education in India creates and reproduces caste and class identities. Through my research, I hope to unpack the mechanisms of how identities reproduce and manifest themselves in new forms through education and how elites contribute to these dynamics.

Previous Education

Harvard University International Education Policy 2020
Anna University Mechanical Engineering 2016