Forthcoming Events

Speaker:
Dr. Rongili Biswas
Assistant Professor of Economics, Maulana Azad College, Kolkata
Associate Researcher in Economics (Honorary),
University of Eastern Piedmont, Italy

Abstract: In this presentation I discuss how during my sojourn in Normandie, France I decided to follow certain traces and build upon it a narrative structure of the man widely regarded as the novelist’s novelist, Gustave Flaubert. The structure I use is fictional in its final form. This presentation talks about the making of that fictional space, writing about the writing, taking into account the master’s three most celebrated works: Sentimental Education, Madame Bovary and The Temptation of St. Anthony. I term the mode of writing palimpsestic – a later writing on a manuscript on which earlier writing has been effaced. I use the idea of ‘ghosting’ to describe the signs/ footprints/ trails of the master’s life and work that came my way and then talk about how I use them to build up the narrative structure.

Invites you to a talk on "An Indian Education for Indian Children:
the family-school relationship and Indian arts"

What would it mean for us to have an "Indian education" for Indian children and why don't we have it? A historian, anthropologist, and educator, Professor Nita Kumar describes in her talk the main problem with Indian education to be the wide gap between the home and the school. A discussion of "Indian children" takes us back to the colonial relationship between the school and the community, when the clear task of schooling was to reform the habits and ethics of the family, and equally to a blinkered understanding of modernity in the present, where certain definitions of knowledge make the family by definition backward and the school modern. Kumar discusses the layers within the discourse of the child in India. She looks at the structure of schooling in its range of schools, all of which have to different degrees lost the resources of the family--the arts of socialization, of learning and teaching, of narratives and symbols. Kumar proposes that, while the path to a resolution of Indian educational problems lies through efficient management, this efficiency can only come from correcting the historical-social anomaly of a family-school antagonism. Kumar discusses how children's lives are barren of the arts and discusses how it is these "Indian" arts that can be used for resolving our educational problems and create an imaginative "Indian" education for Indian children.

Knowledge economy is not what most of us think. Peter F. Drucker who popularised the expression had not thought about its far reaching implications under advanced capitalism. We take it as economy that uses knowledge to produce wealth, especially in terms of computer software and telecommunications. It is IT economy for us. Actually it is much more than that as the economy based on the transaction of New Knowledge both as capital and highly priced commodity, amazingly decisive in the global market. In it economic success is based upon the capacity to command intangible assets such as creativity and innovativeness, which lead to production of new knowledge. It is a system of production and circulation of intellectual capital enabling heavy returns that constitute four-fifth of the global total. The world now calls it techno-capitalism harping on technology and science, which is spawning new forms of corporate power and organization of major implications for the twenty-first century. Corporations have erected a system of intellectual property rights to confiscate creativity, with profound impacts on the economy, science and culture. They battle with one another for control over intangible assets to be first to come up with new products and services. With the growing global importance of intangibles, the inequalities between nations at the vanguard of techno-capitalism and those that are not, are widening; the importance of brain-drain flows between nations is increasing; and the rise of techno-military-corporate complex is replacing the old military-industrial complex. The new corporatism becoming ever more intrusive and rapacious through its control over technology and innovation, several major social, economic, and political consequences are likely in a Country like India.

In the 20th and 21st centuries, debates have raged over the respective domains of religion and science, often resulting in misguided attempts to identify how religion and science interact with one another. Such attempts are misguided in that 1) they are generally too limited in their explanatory power and 2) they presume that the practices of religion and the practices of science are separate and thus able to come into contact with one another as independent entities. In fact, science, technology, and religion are far more like plies in a length of yarn than they are like (non?)overlapping circles; therefore, it is pointless to look for “pure science” or “pure religion.” Examples from apocalyptic dreams of immortality and resurrection in U.S. technology and the integration of cultural traditions in Indian technology reveal how religion, science, and technology are intertwined, pulling one another first one way, then another. These are not religious ideas appended onto science and technology, but are perfectly ordinary examples of human scientific practice.

Synopsis: The rise of new digital technologies of Information and Communication, of which the Internet is the most visible, has introduced an accelerated rate of change in the global economy and socio-cultural practices. A body of work that seeks to deal with, account for and explain the ways in which every-day practices and realities are changing due to emerging (or emerged) forms of computer and digital networks is clubbed together as Cyberculture. This dissertation locates itself within the Cyberculture discourse to develop a theoretical perspective that treats digital and internet technologies as central and integral to the practices of what I call the Technosocial Subject. Beginning with the crises of early technology studies, the dissertation maps how the emergence of digital and internet technologies in the country have shaped our understanding of technology-individual relationships. In revisiting these different crises in the Indian context, which cursorily seems to reflect common trends in other parts of the world, there is an attempt to show how they challenge existing concepts, ideas and theoretical frameworks between space, body and technology within Cyberculture.

The talk can be considered to be in the area of ‘development studies’. I want to argue and delineate an area of research that will be helpful in planning institutions of intellectual activity in a society. The central intuition in conceiving the proposed research task is the following: It is obvious that one can fruitfully investigate what particular skills are the preconditions of acquiring which other further skills and competences. For instance, acquaintance with elementary arithmetic is a prerequisite of acquiring the accountancy skills. One of the focuses of the educational theory is the question: Which skills are pre-requisite of acquiring which other skills? For this purpose one needs to draw a logical order of the structure of different skills and disciplines. Analogously, in order to establish a milieu in a society where knowledge and research can flourish, one needs to know the competent functioning of which institutions is the prerequisite of the competent functioning of which other institutions. Making such a knowledge available is the task of drawing a logical geography of educational and research institutions.
Obviously there are limitations to the use of this analogy between identifying the logical order of skills and logical order of educational institutions. But articulating the scope and limits of the analogy itself will be one theme of the talk.

From time immemorial, we have taken inspiration from nature in all walks of life – and so has Music. Some of the earliest forms of musical sound are wind howling through bamboo shoots or grass acting as reeds to create a whistling sound of varied pitches, birds singing as part of their mating calls etc. Since then, over many millennia, we have evolved from very crude skull-and-gut based, single-stringed instruments to very sophisticated ones such as Tanpura, Veena, Violin, Piano etc. What distinguishes one instrument from another ? Why are some instrument makers more prized than others? Why is the voice timbre of an Opera Singer very different from an Indian Dhrupad Singer? As science and technology evolved, making of instruments has gone through a lot of sophistication too leading to better instruments of more consistent quality. How much of the Music is Art, and where does Science play a role? This is an attempt to address some of these aspects related to the evolution of Musical Sound as perceived through the eyes and the ears of an Artist.

Followed by an interactive session with the co-director

Separated from her daughter Gracelle at 7 months, Noemi Barredo left the Philippines for work in Malaysia to support her parents and extended family before arriving in Ireland in 2000. Filmed over a five-year period, Promise and Unrest is an ethnographic portrayal of a migrant woman performing caregiving and long-distance motherhood, while assuming the responsibility of sole provider for her family in Babatngnon, Philippines. The film captures the agential, material and emotional dimensions of global care work, Gracelle and Noemi’s reunion in Ireland, and the beginnings of a domestic life together in the same country for the first time. The film’s narrative arc is shaped by the mother-daughter voiceover scripted by Noemi and Gracelle themselves, deliberately staged in two languages: the mother-tongue Waray dialect spoken by Noemi, which assumes an epistolary form, in dialogue with an emerging adolescent and accented English – a new and acquired idiom that Gracelle is forced to learn in a new country, enacting the processual dimensions of her own cultural or self-translation. Significantly, neither had read or indeed wanted to read each other’s script in advance and only when they viewed the rough cut, did they learn what the other thought and experienced in both the distant past and immediate present.

Speaker: Alexander Darius Ornella
Department of Religious Studies,University of Hull, UK

Abstract: "Man as Industrial Palace" (1926) is the title of probably the most famous of Fritz Kahn’s, a German gynecologist, body illustrations. It was published as part of the five volume book series "The Life of Man" (Kahn 1922-1931) in which Kahn heavily draws on machine analogies to explain the inner workings of the body to an audience not familiar with professional or detailed medical and anatomical knowledge. This paper will argue that machinic and technological bodies need to be understood as boundary bodies: but not as bodies that are neither human nor machine, but as bodies that seem to be easy to categories but defy all categorization. They are bodies on the verge of becoming yet not becoming. Based on Kahn's illustrations, it will conclude with some reflections on how boundary-bodies and bodies-on-the-verge are "making humans".

Presented by Centre for Film and Drama

Day and Date: Tuesday 12 March 2013
Venue: Satish Dhawan Auditorium, IISc
Time: 6.30 pm

Cast
Sharanya Ramprakash
Prakash Belawadi
Balaji Manohar

Abstract: Frayn's play Copenhagen speculates on what might have transpired during a meeting between Nobel laureates Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg in Copenhagen in September 1941, at the height of the German advance into Russia and just three months before America's entry into the war. The power of National Socialist Germany was at its pinnacle, and the Germans had just been made aware, through Swedish sources, of U.S. plans to build an atomic bomb.

Invites you to participate in a three-day: Workshop on Photography, Documentary Making and Exhibition Technique as an Aid to Education

Abstract: It will be a three days interactive workshop on the ways to implement photography, documentary making and exhibition methods for the purpose of education. The workshop will be jointly conducted by renowned French documentary film maker, author and photographer Fabian Da Costa.

Abstract: Many people who become interested in peace between Palestinians and Israelis often turn to concepts of or projects engaging with coexistence. Coexistence projects often take the form of Palestinian and Israeli children gathering together at summer camp, often far away from home, in an effort to bridge the divide. Films, novels, songs, and poetry also engage with this topic in a way that expresses the desire to create a utopian society in which everyone is equal. In this talk Marcy Newman will critique these models arguing that coexistence projects normalize relationships that should be thought of as intrinsically abnormal. In Palestine, coexistence it is a way to minimize resistance and control Palestinian discourse and the historical narrative, particularly since the first intifada in 1987. Analyzing three documentaries about coexistence including Justine Shapiro, B.Z. Goldberg, and Carlos Bolado's Promises, Mark Landsman's Peace of Mind, and Marjan Safinia's Seeds, and Paul Smaczny’s Knowledge is the Beginning, she explores some of the key ways that Palestinians are pushed into further submission through normalization programs. Newman argues that coexistence is certainly the ideal for proponents of a one-state solution, but prior to a just solution for Palestinians such schemes merely maintain the status quo of Israeli colonial domination over Palestinians.

Abstract: Proponents of Asianism invoke Asia in order to challenge a linear narrative of history and hope to turn the unevenness present in global capitalist world into something positive. Unlike modernization theorists who suggested that underdeveloped countries were fated to follow their more advanced Western counterparts, pan-Asianists argued for an Asian alternative. From this perspective, Asianists anticipated the view of postcolonialists in that they refused to accept the model of development propagated in the West and proposed a pluralistic world. Indeed, this is why as scholars shifted away from Marxism towards various forms of postcolonialism, which advocated alternative or multiple modernities, Asianism has also been on the rise and people have begun reevaluating Takeuchi Yoshimi and other Asianists. In this essay, I would like to examine a fundamental theoretical rift between postcolonialism and Marxism, and then show how this issue relates to our understanding of pan-Asianism. The post-colonial challenge can be understood as part of a larger trend in post-structuralist theory to criticize Hegel. In short postcolonial critics claim that Marxists like Hegel before them, are not capable of grasping the particularity of non-Western nations. I will make a gesture in the direction of Hegel and argue that difference makes sense only in the light of a larger global dynamic. I contend that we can make sense of the subjective desire for particularity embodied in Asianism and postcolonialism by situating them in relation to the logic of global capitalism.