Dear All:
You are cordially invited to a talk and presentation by Ashish Rajadhyaksha, media
historian and
archivist from the Centre for the Study of Culture & Society in Bangalore, India on
THURSDAY 11 MAY
2006 at 5.00 p.m.
Ashish will introduce the Comprehensive Online Resource for Education (CORE), a recent
initiative of
CSCS, and present a short history of changing practices of database management, digital
archiving,
and curriculum and courseware development at CSCS for teaching cultural studies and social
sciences
in India.
See the detailed description of the talk, and more information about Ashish Rajadhyaksha,
please see
the text and links below. Please RSVP to Shekhar Krishnan ( shekhar(a)mit.edu ) if you plan
to attend,
and please forward this invitation to your friends and colleagues in the Boston-Cambridge
area.
WHEN:
Thursday 11 May 2006 at 5.00 p.m.
WHERE:
MIT Building 9-253
http://whereis.mit.edu/map-jpg?mapterms=9-253&mapsearch=go
WHO:
ASHISH RAJADHYAKSHA is Senior Fellow of the Centre for the Study of Culture & Society
(CSCS),
Bangalore [1], where he coordinates the CSCS Media Archive [2] and the CSCS CORE
(Comprehensive
Online Resource for Education) [3]. With Paul Willemen, he was co-author and editor of the
Encyclopaedia of Indian Cinema (1999). He is an active member of the editorial collective
of the
Journal of Arts and Ideas [4], and is a regular contributor to the journals Framework and
Sight &
Sound, and an advisor to CRIT (Collective Research Initiatives Trust), Mumbai [5].
He has written Ritwik Ghatak: A Return to the Epic (1983), was Editor, The Sad and Glad of
Kishore
Kumar (Research Centre for Cinema Studies, 1988); was Editor, with Amrit Gangar, of
Ghatak:
Arguments/Stories (Screen Unit/Research Centre for Cinema Studies, 1987). He was
co-curator, with
Geeta Kapur, of the exhibition Bombay/Mumbai 1992-2001, part of the exhibition Century
City: Art and
Culture in the Modern Metropolis, at the Tate Modern, London, 2001 [6]. Ashish's
forthcoming book is
called CINEMA IN THE TIME OF CELLULOID: INDIAN EVIDENCE 2005-1925 (New Delhi: Tulika
Books, 2007).
[1]
http://cscsban.org
[2]
http://cscsarchive.org
[3]
http://www.mit.edu/~shekhar/official/cscs_core.pdf
[4]
http://dsal.uchicago.edu/books/artsandideas
[5]
http://www.crit.org.in
[6]
http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/exhibitions/centurycity/ccmumbai.htm
ABOUT THE TALK:
CSCS and the New Academic Domain in India
The Centre for the Study of Culture & Society was founded in 1998 in Bangalore, as a
‘new
generation’ academic research centre. While CSCS derived its historical legacy from the
tradition of
institutionalised social science research as supported by the well-known state-run
institutes of the
ICSSR (Indian Council for Social Science Research), it has also struck out on its own with
new
models for inter-disciplinary and inter-institutional pedagogy and research in the field
of social
science and theory.
The Digital Resource
Since the late 1990s, CSCS has experimented with database formats that could be
transformed into
teachable instruments. In 1999 CSCS started its Media & Culture Archive, and extended
this in 2004
into India’s only M.A. programme in Cultural Studies taught entirely online. In 2005, this
was
further extended into the Undergraduate Diploma Programme in Cultural Studies. In the
future, CSCS
seeks to consolidate effective databasing with online pedagogy, by further linking this
connection
to the larger needs of social science pedagogy in India.
The Social Sciences in India
Indian social science research has been, since the 1970s and the pioneering work of the
Subaltern
Studies Collective, perhaps the most significant social science research tradition
worldwide for
close to two decades. Among its significant aspects has been its interlinking with the
priorities of
India’s NGO movement together with the needs of academic institutions both inside and
outside the
University.
Furthering this linkage, social science research has mined the resources provided by
numerous
practices of independent informal archiving. As such archiving encounters the problems of
digitization, it has also opened social science practice into three further areas: (1) The
linking
of the special skills of navigating the archives with new techniques of online pedagogy,
(2) The
options opened up by online publication, and (3) The need for consolidated structures of
data
collaboration including academically valid search platforms.
The Domain of ‘Informal Archiving’ in India
Since roughly the late 1970s (conventionally from the time of the end of the Emergency),
non-governmental organisations have attempted a form of archiving, alongside their work on
advocacy,
research, training and monitoring in their specialised fields of interest. Since the
mid-1990s, this
movement has also sought to enter the domain of digitization at various levels, and with
varying
results.
The ‘informal archive’ in India could consist of anything between 3-5,000 institutions
seeking to
work at various levels, from the collection to the catalogue to the archive itself. It is
now a
sufficiently significant database, with sufficiently significant problems, to merit an
independent
look, as the phenomenon grows in tandem with the research work of social scientists in
India.
_________
The Comprehensive Online Resource for Education (CORE) is an attempt to think through a
possible
strategy for bringing together the diverse resources and research materials available in
different
locations of new social science research in India, with a possible Asian extension. CORE
hopes to
bring into focus the the need to convert critical research into teachable, intelligible
and easily
accessible knowledge bases, the identifying of effective online tools and methods for
teaching and
learning, and the relocation of education centres, the educators and the students within
the digital
interfaces of cyberspace – all within the domain of higher education in social sciences in
Asia.
For more information on CORE, see the full proposal on
http://www.mit.edu/~shekhar/official/cscs_core.pdf and contact Ashish Rajadhyaksha on
ashish(a)cscsban.org.
--
Shekhar Krishnan
Apt.302, Edgerton House
143, Albany Street
Cambridge, MA 02139
U.S.A.
http://www.crit.org.in/members/shekhar
http://www.mit.edu/~shekhar