CSCS — Centre for the Study of Culture and Society

Publications: Alice in Bluleshwar: Navigating a Mumbai Neighbourhood; Vachanas as Caste Critiques Orientalist Expression of Native Experience; Enculturing Law: New Agendas for Legal Pedagogy; Between Empires: print and politics in Goa; Problematizing Democracy; Feminist Standpoint and the Question of Experience; More…

FAREWELL AND NEW BEGINININGS

On August 15, 2014, HEIRA ceases to exist under that name.

As part of its interest in working towards changing the higher education sector in India, the Centre for the Study of Culture and Society (CSCS), established in 1998, set up a Higher Education Cell in 2007 in collaboration with the Sir Ratan Tata Trust. The ground for this had been prepared when CSCS faculty members Tejaswini Niranjana and Mrinalini Sebastian had researched the history and present situation of Indian higher education to write up a Strategy Paper for the Trust.

The Paper listed the possible directions in which independent funding could help address the different kinds of crises in the sector – to do with inflexible institutional structures, outdated and non-relevant curricula, poorly trained teachers, and lack of new resources for students.

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CSCS Updates - 2022

LIST OF CSCS ACTIVITIES – MARCH 2022

CSCS Digital Innovations Fund (CDIF):

The Digital Innovations Fund (CDIF) is a means to support institutions and projects working on (1) New technologies of digital archiving, (2) New forms of digital dissemination on public and open-source platforms.

Previous support:

CIS: Support to the Centre for Internet & Society (between 2014-2018): to develop the Open Media Library, server-independent peer-to-peer mechanism for archiving printed text.

For more see: https://cis-india.org/raw/cdif

In the past year:

CAMP: CDIF (CSCS Digital Innovations Fund) and CAMP have a three-year agreement, to support outward facing projects that build upon their online platforms and digital infrastructures. To this end, CAMP continued working on its projects titled Bombay Wiki (at https://bombaywiki.with.camp/Index), processing material acquired by CAMP for their housing histories project that included newspaper cuttings, archival photographs, print periodicals, court judgements, correspondence, and journals and tracts belonging to various NGO's such as BUILD and Nivara Hakk Suraksha Samiti. See: https://pad.ma/documents/grid/type/collection==camp.bot:campscans, and its multi-year research project into housing histories of Bombay/Mumbai. See https://ghar.with.camp/#about for more.
Zinnia Ambapardiwala maintained the back-end workflow for the material that was collectively worked upon by the CAMP team including Ashok Sukumaran, Shaina Anand, Zulekha Sayyed and Simpreet Singh.

RESEARCH PROJECTS

Book series, titled Culture and Democracy at the Millennial Turn, published in partnership with Orient-Blackswan, showcasing the work of CSCS research. In the past year a new volume titled Law and Life: Conversations with Upendra Baxi is now ready for publication. Culture-Critique-Clinic (CCC) (Anup Dhar/Ashish Rajadhyaksha) and The Difficulty of Being Heathen (A.P. Ashwin Kumar, Vivek Dhareshwar) are forthcoming. The new title Overload, Creep, Excess: An Internet from India is now being published by the Institute of Networked Cultures unbder its Theory on Demand series (#45). See https://networkcultures.org/publications/

Previous title:

Breaking the Silo: Integrated Science Education in India (ed. Tejaswini Niranjana, Anup Dhar and K. Sridhar)

For more see: https://orientblackswan.com/details?id=9789386392886

CSCS Special Projects (Faculty): Support for individual projects by any member of CSCS faculty.

FTII Research Project (led by Ashish Rajadhyaksha): project to research the history of the Film & Television Institution of India and its sister institution, the National Film Archive of India (NFAI).

The book John-Ghatak-Tarkovsky: Citizens, Filmmakers, Hackers, is ready for publication (see http://cup.columbia.edu/book/johnghataktarkovsky/9788195055975)

Saath-Saath (led by Tejaswini Niranjana): project to set up musical collaborations

Inter-Asia Cultural Studies: network and consortium of academic institutions in Asia. CSCS is a member of the consortium and a collaborator on several events.

For more see: http://saathsaathmusic.com/

India Since the Nineties: New collaboration with Tulika Books, Delhi, and West Heavens, Hong Kong, for a series of six volumes, of which three have been published. See https://tulikabooks.in/series/post/india-since-the-90s/