Educating Youth: Regulation through Psychosocial Skilling in India studies the rise in skill-based developmental interventions for young people that aim to harness youth potential. Tracing these changes to the neoliberalization of education and training globally, this book discusses how a range of training programs, from social and personality development skills to employability and vocational skills, seek to cultivate an ethic of self-responsibility through skilling, to overcome structural disadvantage among the marginalized youth. Examining one such form of training in depth, Life Skills Education or LSE, that is advocated by international organizations, such as WHO and UNICEF, and popularized in India by various actors---from the state departments of education to local non-governmental organisations and middle-class citizens-this book shows how these programmes get adapted and modified within the Indian context. It demonstrates how authoritarian adult-child relations, caste inequalities and rote culture inflect the messages for self-development that the programmes transmit. Discussing the impact of these psychosocial skilling programmes observed in the Indian context, the book reflects on the cultural disconnects and internal limitations of liberal, progressive and experiential pedagogies in achieving intended outcomes.

Although science was originally broadly conceptualized as a systematic, rigorous activity to produce trustworthy knowledge, psychologists adopted a single philosophy of science and strictly enforced natural science as the only proper "scientific" psychology. Qualitative research has been part of modern psychology from the beginning, but it was obscured for nearly a century as positivist epistemology came to dominate the field. Building culturally robust and intelligible theories capable of responding more effectively to complex problems faced by a rapidly changing world calls for openness in methodological diversity. Deeply rooted in a hermeneutic tradition, cultural psychology has challenged the appropriateness of seeking reductive knowledge because higher mental processes such as religious beliefs, values, and choices are bound by historical and cultural context. As greater interdisciplinary integration and methodological innovations are necessary to keep psychology of religion relevant, narrative inquiry has emerged as a promising integrative paradigm.