One Day Workshop on "English Studies and the Ethnographic Imagination"

One-day Workshop/ UPE-II

English Studies and the Ethnographic Imagination

Resource Person: Dr Leela Prasad, Duke University, USA.

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 The Department of English has been contemplating a new series of Workshops/ Roundtables on English in India beginning 2016. Accordingly, we now propose a preliminary one-day Workshop on 4 January 2016 involving a senior scholar and select group of researchers who are at the threshold of a career in English Studies. The Workshop hopes to orient beginners toward methods and materials for research in English across closely-related social scientific/ humanist disciplines. It is hoped that these exercises and interaction will encourage them to broaden their perspectives of the home discipline and work with more cross-disciplinary resources and develop appropriate methods for critical thinking and scholarly analysis.   

 

While the general aim of the Department's English in India Workshops is to sensitize younger colleagues and researchers to their professional needs and challenges, their disciplinary scope and range will remain the focus of our deliberations. Our first Workshop will be on "English Studies and the Ethnographic Imagination." Associate Professor Leela Prasad, Department of Religious Studies/ Asian and Middle-Eastern Studies, Duke University, USA, will conduct this Workshop scheduled for 4 January 2016. Dr Prasad's Workshop will bring to the participants the following questions and generate day-long exchange of fresh ideas and revised notions of texts and supplements (of 'primary and secondary sources' of an earlier regime):

What is "ethnographic consciousness"? Does English in India suffer from a lack of this, given its colonial antecedents and linguistic imperialist tendencies? What distinguishes an ethnographer from a reader/ literary critic? What common grounds do we see in ethnographic protocols and the study of English in multilingual/ multicultural India? How can one meaningfully engage with cultural texts and traditions that apparently share no common ground? Furthermore, how best we might archive such resources without losing the complexity of the local discourses inherent in them? Are generative ethnographic stories, fiction? How does ethnography change the very idea of genre? What enriching perspectives and handy models have seasoned ethnographers (James Clifford, George Marcus, Kirin Narayan, Karen McCarthy Brown, for example) and others with sensitive bias towards ethnographic pursuits (Susan Stewart, Margaret Mills, Mary Louis Pratt, V. Narayana Rao...) offered English and Cultural Studies? How we draw on emerging work in interdisciplinary "poetics" to imagine and fashion a new creative sensibility that engages Indian lived realities?

Details of the Workshop (Tentative)

Venue: Lecture Hall (Department of English)

Schedule: Welcome and informal introduction; briefing reg. structure of the proceedings; power-point presentation: select work/ video-clippings; collation of responses to assigned viewing/ reading; questions and discussion throughout the sessions interspersed with comments/ responses by the resource person.

Sessions: 2 (Forenoon: 9.30 to 12.30; Afternoon: 2 to 4.30)

Valedictory and announcements: 4.30 to 5 PM.

The usual tea break and recess as required by the group. 

An exhibition of titles in English and allied disciplines (local publishers)