Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, New Delhi
Department of Humanities and Social Sciences
CALL FOR PAPERS
Caste as Identity in the City: Urbanity, Space and Power
A One-Day Graduate Students' Conference
Saturday 23 April 2015
In a striking juxtaposition in his 2012 book, Cracked Mirror (co-written with Sundar Sarukkai), Gopal Guru counterposes Gandhi's free and easy access to public space in the city to that of Ambedkar. The latter was forced to move between the few areas that welcomed him; vast spaces in the city including its maidans remained closed to him; a mode of secrecy and surreptitiousness was enforced upon him. Keeping in mind the perpetual counterpoint of the low-caste person in the city, how can we re-imagine social history, urban movement, spatial and temporal shifts as well as cultural and political transformations over time? HSS's Graduate Students' Conference this year will feature the many shapes and phantasms of caste in the city as its chief focus, calling for such issues to be addressed in all manner of disciplinary registers and straddling the divide between the empirical and the theoretical.
Research papers may address the following themes:
Questions of caste as they relate to urban identity, structural shifts in urban planning, responses from local governments to changing demographics, the changing forms of employment and mobility.
Caste as it is reflected in literary, cinematic and theatrical subcultures in the city.
We are especially interested in papers that address hidden forms of exclusion in educational institutions, in firms in the private and public sector as well as in the service sector. What are the new forms of political and social mobilization around caste that these give rise to? And to what extent do they palimpsest older forms of solidarity going back to the history of women's, working-class and anti-caste movements from the late 19C into the 20C, but whose effects continue to be felt in the 21C?
We hope that the question of caste as it determines issues of class, gender and ethnicity will provide new conceptual indices or new concepts in the domains of political and social theory. This will help make more fecund the emerging field of dalit studies and ensure that the latter is not merely another token annexe to the domain of the social sciences.
The call for papers is open for all graduate students engaged in masters or doctoral studies in any discipline of the Humanities, Social Sciences, Law, Architecture, Planning or Engineering.
Submissions are invited for the conference from students pursuing studies towards a Masters degree or Research Scholars working on a Doctoral Research. Abstracts for papers of not more than 300 words should be submitted to milindw{AT}hss.iitd.ac.in by 25 March 2015. In the submission the student must clearly mention her/his name, department/ centre/ institution, roll number/ registration number and year of admission into the current programme. Selected papers would be notified by 30 March 2015. Participants would be required to submit final papers of 2500-3000 words by 15 April 2015. The expected length of presentations would be 15 minutes. No TA/ DA will be paid to participants.
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