Course on Researching the Contemporary at CSDS Delhi
- Last Date : 30 April 2013 -

Course on Researching the Contemporary

1 July - 31 August 2013

The Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS) invites applications for its two-month Course on ‘Researching the Contemporary’. This cross-disciplinary Course will critically examine the formation of the contemporary and its multiple histories, ideologies, forms and affects. The three courses offered will enable participants to familiarize themselves with concepts, theories and methods that help analyse the contemporary. These include:

I. Media and Historical Method

This course will explore the way media technologies and their modes of social and cultural existence constitute human experience in the modern and contemporary epoch. It is simultaneously conceived of as an invitation to explore historical method.

We will consider the vantage point of media experience as a crucial way of engaging what it has meant to live in historical time; specifically, how cognition, sense perception, bodily and emotional engagement have been configured at key junctures through the media, including print culture (newspapers, novels, popular pamphlet, pulp and visual culture), sound technologies (radio, gramophone, cassette and digital formats), photography, film, and the broader configuration of new media. Our aim is not an exhaustive tracing of histories and linkages. Rather, it is to explore media as a key site of historical experience, what it has meant to read, listen, view, touch and feel, and how this has constituted our everyday life and social and political engagement. In the process, we will consider what such a focus means for historical method, to `do’ history, by complicating our understanding of the nature of the modern archive. How do we engage media as an object of historical analysis, what do media offer evidence of, what is the status of the visual and auditory material relayed by media technologies, especially in conditions of media manipulation? What new problems and possibilities are heralded by digital technologies in framing media histories and effects?

Course Instructor: Ravi Vasudevan

II. Religion and State in Modern Indian Thought

The course will explore transformations in the meaning of the terms “religion” and “state” and the relationship between the two in 19th century and early 20th century India. In short, it examines the changing contours of state and religion under conditions of modernity. In order to do so we must understand how these terms were used in the earlier period and what forces affected a change in their meaning and relationship with the advent of colonial modernity.

Course Instructors: Rajeev Bhargava and Sudipta Kaviraj

III. Reading, Writing and the Work of Theory - in lieu of ‘Method’

In this course we intend to reflect on the complex nature of reading, writing and theorizing. These are distinct yet related practices that centrally constitute the scholarly enterprise. However while we all engage in these practices, we mostly do so either unmindfully or imitatively. This course tries to make them the core of its concern. We believe that knowledge must be thought not only epistemologically but also through the questions of form, rhetoric and understanding. This is something that most disciplines today recognize in their attempt to incorporate resistant materials and archives which do not easily lend themselves to standard disciplinary interpretations and theoretical modes. For this purpose we hope to pay close attention to a set of texts from the global south that bring forth questions of texture, logic and materiality of thought.

Course Instructors: Aditya Nigam, Rakesh Pandey, Prathama Banerjee

The Course will be conducted over 8 weeks between 1 July-31 August 2013. Classes will be held at CSDS on week-day afternoons, Tuesday to Thursday, from 3-6 pm.

Applications are invited from M.Phil/Ph.D students as well as independent researchers. As part of your application please submit your C.V. and a 1000-word description of your research question/topic.

Selected out of station participants shall be provided with roundtrip travel expenses (3-tier AC) and a stipend of Rs.20,000/-

Deadline: 30 April 2013 Link here