Social Theory and Asian Dialogues

Ananta Kumar Giri is on the faculty of the Madras Institute of Development Studies, Chennai, India. He has taught and done research at universities in India and abroad, including Aalborg University in Denmark, the University of Kentucky, USA, the University of Freiburg & Humboldt University, Germany and Jagiellonian University in Poland. His research interests lie in social movements and cultural change, criticism, creativity and contemporary dialectics of transformation, theories of self, culture and society, and creative streams in education, philosophy and literature. 

Social Theory and Asian Dialogues: An Introduction and an Invitation.- Part One: Theorizing as Dancing Transformations: Social Theory, Asian Dialogues and Beyond.- Social Theory and Asian Dialogues: Cultivating Planetary Conversations.- Theorizing Alternative Futures of Asia: Activating Enabling Traditions.- Critical Theory after the Rise of the Global South.- Beyond Ethnocentrism: Towards a Global Social Theory.- Part Two: Social Theory and Asian Dialogues: Creative Engagement and Transformative Learning.- Selfhood and Morality: East-Asian and Western Dimensions.- Iridescent Self in the Womb of the Wholly M(O)ther:  A Vajrayani Meditation.- TheTaijitu, Western Dialectics, and Brain Hemisphere Function: A Dialogue facilitated by the Scholarship of Complex Integration.- A Middle Way of Emptying Dualism in Social Theory.- Indo-Chinese Knowledge and Wisdom: A Cross-Cultural Dialogue Between Confucius and Tiruvalluvar.- Dancing East and West: Charting Intercultural Possibilities in the Thought of Gilles Deleuze and Prabhat Ranjan Sarkar.- The Micropolitics and Metaphysics of Mobility and Nomadism: A Comparative Study of Rahul Sankrityayan’s ‘GhumakkaṚ ŚĀatra’ and Gilles Deleuze / FÉlix Guattari’s ‘Nomadology’.- From Ecological Ontology to Social Ecology: John Dewey, Radhakamal Mukerjee, and Interscalar Ethics.- Part Three: Social Theory and Asian Dialogues: Asia, Europe and the Call of Planetary Conversions.- Nature, Culture and the Debate With Modernity: Critical Social Theory in Japan.- The Self-Description of Society in East Asia: If It is Not Society, What Else Could it Be?.- An Intercultural Perspective on Chinese Aesthetics.- Making Sociology Universal: Revisiting the Contributions of Syed Hussein Alatas.- Political Intrusion in Social Science: The Elimination of Leftist Critical Thinking in Indonesia.- Social Welfare and Harmony in East Asia and the Nordic Region.- Critical Theory and Communicative Action: The Challenge of Legitimation in a World at Risk.- The Gift of the Grain: Beyond Biopolitics?.- Democracy and Meritocracy: A New Inter-Civilizational Challenge.- Afterword: Communication and the Consilience of Eastern and Western Ideas.