We inhabit an increasingly asymmetrical world order marked by uncertainty, fragility, and unpredictability in human exchanges. The stabilising certainties that once anchored social life, relatively durable institutions, bounded communities, and shared moral vocabularies, have gradually eroded. No place today can claim absolute safety, and no society remains culturally self contained. Globalisation, intensified migration, technological acceleration, and the reconfiguration of political and economic power have together produced a condition in which mobility is simultaneously a necessity and a risk. People move across regions and nations in pursuit of better life chances, yet migration is never merely economic. Migrants carry with them layered histories, identities, cultural dispositions, linguistic habits, and unequal technological competencies. These do not dissolve upon arrival. Rather, they reappear in altered forms, often under conditions of heightened visibility, vulnerability, and tension.

Encounters between cultures, particularly between what are broadly designated as the East and the West, rarely unfold on symmetrical terms. Such encounters remain structured by historically sedimented hierarchies of power, race, and epistemic authority. Language itself becomes a site of mis-recognition, producing what sociologists have long described as symbolic violence. Expectations collide, meanings fracture, and identities are unsettled. Under these pressures, individuals and groups often seek refuge in larger identity formations such as religion, nationalism, or oppositional political positions that are swiftly labelled anti national or deviant. Liberal representative democracy, once invested with the promise of accommodating difference through pluralism and rights, increasingly appears inadequate to regulate these anxieties. Political representation loses moral depth, governance becomes procedural rather than ethical, and the capacity to hold together social difference weakens. What emerge, then, are questions central to sociological inquiry. How does one live together in a multicultural society organised around the nation state? How can difference be acknowledged without reproducing exclusion?

It is against this wider condition of global uncertainty that certain contemporary intellectual practices acquire renewed significance, not through proclamation but through their mode of circulation. The recent digital availability of lectures by eminent Jawaharlal Nehru University alumni gestures toward a revitalised form of public engagement, allowing critical traditions........

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