South Asia Work in Progress: Roundtable for Scholars of South Asia

South Asia Work in Progress (SAWIP) is an interdisciplinary forum for scholars of South Asia to present their ‘works in progress’ in a small group setting. It forms part of the activities of Wolfson’s South Asia Research Cluster and is convened in partnership with the Contemporary South Asian Studies Programme.

SAWIP offers a friendly verbal peer-review environment for the presentation and discussion of journal articles, book proposals, research projects and any other kind of research undertaking, at all stages of production from ‘sketchy’ to ‘close to press’.

It aims to unite scholars from a range of disciplines and provide a space to explore both the craft of research and ways of approaching scholarship on South Asia.

If you would like to present or participate in SAWIP, or for more information, please contact kate.sullivan@area.ox.ac.uk.


Past Roundtables

Tuesday 6 March 2012

5.00 - 6.30pm, Wolfson College

Women Icons of Islamic Politics in Pakistan – The Real Losers of the War on Terror

Afiya Shehrbano Zia discusses some contemporary cases where women have been valorised as bearers of Islam and national culture, and argues that such feminisation of Islamic politics has actively advanced the interests of patriarchal forces in the country. Afiya is a feminist researcher and activist based in Karachi, author of ‘Sex Crime in the Islamic Context’ (1994) and ‘Watching Them Watching Us’ (2000), and will be a visiting fellow at Warwick during 2012.

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Wednesday 25 January 2012

5:00 - 6.30pm, Wolfson College
  
Airbrushed out of climate change: India’s informal economy
 
Professor Barbara Harriss-White and Dr Alfred Gathorne-Hardy discuss their new research project investigating the neglected research area of the impact of India's informal economies on climate change.

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Monday 29 November 2011

5.00 – 6.30pm, Wolfson College

Economic liberalism meets political illiberalism in Western India

Dr Nikita Sud explores an Indian province at the forefront of economic liberalisation and growth – Gujarat – and shows that while associational life has prospered in Gujarat since the late 1980s, contra neo-liberal projections, it has been of the politically illiberal variety. She discusses the socio-political landscape of Gujarat, interrogates explanations in the literature for why political illiberalism has accompanied economic liberalisation there, and highlights the role of the ‘reinvented’ state in the convergence of liberalisation and Hindu nationalism.

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Wednesday 2 March 2011

5.00 - 6.30pm, Wolfson College

The Mahābhārata as Indo-European: A Progress Report

 Dr Nick Allen explores the great Sanskrit epic, the Mahābhārata, a key document in classical or post-Vedic Hindu culture. He asks whether the epic can be used in an attempt to reconstruct proto-IE culture, similar to the way in which comparativists use Sanskrit to reconstruct the hypothetical proto-Indo-European language. Building on the work of Georges Dumézil, who made considerable use of the Mahābhārata in developing his trifunctional theory of early IE ideology, Nick reinterprets Dumézil’s triadic schema as in fact pentadic, and formulates a useful model for viewing Indian cultural history.

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Wednesday 2 January 2011

2 – 3.30pm,  Wolfson College

“Adulterer, tramp or thief, a husband is a husband”: Alcohol, Violence and ‘Women's Suffering’ among Dalits in rural Andhra Pradesh

 Dr Clarinda Still draws on a series of case studies to illuminate issues relating to alcohol, violence and ‘women’s suffering’ among Dalits in India. The ethnographic material she presents suggests that consumption of alcohol and violence towards women are intricately connected to emergent concepts of honour, shame and masculinity in the Dalit community, notions that are best understood in relation to the rapidly changing socio-economic context of which they are part.