Scholarly Interests:

Navneet Kumar is an Assistant Professor in the Department of General Education at Mount Royal University in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. He has a Ph.D. in Postcolonial Theory and Literatures from the University of Calgary. His recent work focuses on religion democracy and the public sphere, xenophobia in the context of citizenship, belonging and Saidian humanism.

Teaching Statement:

Teaching is the practice to train the mind toward freedom. The core of my teaching philosophy is the belief that a humanities classroom is a place where the training of the mind can happen; a training of the imagination so that an "uncoercive rearrangement of our desires" can allow us to reimagine the Other and reassess our deepest biases and prejudices. Students need to engage with the public sphere through philology (a careful and a lifelong attentiveness to the words and rhetoric) and there is a responsibility that devolves upon us to engage the students inside the classroom. Furthermore, the philological exercise is an imperative that needs to be worldly too to connect the classroom to the public sphere.

Relevant Publications and/or Presentations:

(2024) “Fostering Resilience Through Judith Butler’s Performative in a Neoliberal World,” a peer-reviewed chapter in The Liminal Beings: Vulnerability and Resilience published by Vernon Press, Edited by Raisun Mathew. Forthcoming 2024.

(2021) “Black Criminality: A Matter of ‘Truth’ and our Acquiescence,” a chapter in Between Truth and Falsity: Liberal Education and the Arts of Discernment published by Vernon Press, Edited by Karim Dharamsi and David Ohreen.

(2018) “Liberal Education and Democracy: Challenging Neoliberal Conceptions of Pedagogy,” a chapter in Liberal Education and the Idea of the University published by Vernon Press, Edited by Karim Dharamsi and Jim Zimmer.

(2014) “Statelessness and the Power of Performance.” Ed. Nikita Dhawan. Decolonizing Enlightenment: Transnational Justice, Human Rights and Democracy in a Postcolonial World. Barbara Budrich Publishers. 295-310.

Recent or Relevant Grants, Honours or Awards:

(2024) Awarded the Faculty Development Fund (FDC) for paper presentation at the ACLA annual conference in Montreal, for $ 1927.00