Dr. Ramu Manivannan currently serves as Honorary Chairperson at Multiversity – Centre for Indigenous Knowledge Systems, Kurumbapalayam, Vellore, Tamil Nadu. He combines research and teaching experiments in education, development, and democracy with special interest on indigenous knowledge systems. He is a writer, public commentator and contributor to several Indian print and visual media outlets.
Dr. Manivannan served as a Professor and Head of the Department of Politics and Public Administration, University of Madras for sixteen years. He taught in Hindu College, Delhi University for over 18 years before joining the University of Madras. He was a fellow of the United Nations University, Tokyo, Japan. He has been working with refugees from Tibet, Burma and Sri Lanka for over three decades in the areas of peace, education and development. He has founded fifteen non-formal schools for the children from tribal areas, stone quarry areas and the weavers’ community before building an alternative school, Garden of Peace, for rural children based on holistic education, located in Kurumbapalayam in Vellore, Tamil Nadu.
Dr. Manivannan’s Fulbright-Nehru project aims to undertake a comparative study on John Rawls, Amartya Sen and J. C. Kumarappa based on their works on justice and examine the implications of their ideas to the notions of democracy and development in India. Given the combination of teaching and research plan, he will also be teaching papers on democracy and development in India and South Asia, besides co-teaching a paper on the political economy of Brazil and India.