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CSLG organises a lecture by Raphael Susewind

CSLG organises a lecture by Raphael Susewind

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CSLG organises a lecture by Raphael Susewind
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CENTRE FOR THE STUDY OF LAW AND GOVERNANCE
 
Jawaharlal Nehru University
 
SEMINAR SERIES
 
RAPHAEL SUSEWIND
 
 Lecturer in Social Anthropology and Development,
 
King's College London  
 
On
 
 Property and propriety: Religion and urban conflict in Lucknow
 
 Abstract
 
 A number of scholars have argued that discrimination against Muslims in India’s urban housing markets stems from long histories of Hindu-Muslim ‘communal’ violence, and that the resulting antagonism and discrimination against Muslim tenants and home-buyers leads to their permanent ‘ghettoisation’. In such accounts, the state is portrayed as absent and unable to provide ethnic minorities with a sense of security, so that disenfranchised Muslims seek out the ‘safety in numbers’ of segregated and often traditional neighbourhoods, even when urban housing markets provide updated and modern accommodation elsewhere. Based on official property registration data and ethnographic fieldwork in Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh, I complicate this narrative, focusing on the productive practices of networking and collusion that enable a veritable building boom in ‘traditional’ Muslim neighbourhoods, often underpinned by a specific middle-class morality that replaces ethical concern for solidarity with narrow codes of ‘proper’ conduct. This underlines the importance of intra-group contestation to intergroup conflict, and the limits of purely instrumentalist explanations of communal segregation.
 
3.00 PM, Thursday, 21 February 2019
 
Conference Room, CSLG, JNU 
 
About the Speaker: Raphael Susewind is Lecturer in Social Anthropology & Development at King's College London. He studies popular politics, religious conflict, the political economy of corruption and urban development in North India, building on a unique mix of ethnographic, statistical and spatial data.
 
   
 PLEASE JOIN US FOR TEA AFTER THE SEMINAR
 
ALL ARE WELCOME

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Initially, established as a Centre for Chinese and Japanese Studies, it subsequently grew to include Korean Studies as well. At present there are eight faculty members in the Centre. Several distinguished faculty who have now retired include the late Prof. Gargi Dutt, Prof. P.A.N. Murthy, Prof. G.P. Deshpande, Dr. Nranarayan Das, Prof. R.R. Krishnan and Prof. K.V. Kesavan. Besides, Dr. Madhu Bhalla served at the Centre in Chinese Studies Programme during 1994-2006. In addition, Ms. Kamlesh Jain and Dr. M. M. Kunju served the Centre as the Documentation Officers in Chinese and Japanese Studies respectively.

The academic curriculum covers both modern and contemporary facets of East Asia as each scholar specializes in an area of his/her interest in the region. The integrated course involves two semesters of classes at the M. Phil programme and a dissertation for the M. Phil and a thesis for Ph. D programme respectively. The central objective is to impart an interdisciplinary knowledge and understanding of history, foreign policy, government and politics, society and culture and political economy of the respective areas. Students can explore new and emerging themes such as East Asian regionalism, the evolving East Asian Community, the rise of China, resurgence of Japan and the prospects for reunification of the Korean peninsula. Additionally, the Centre lays great emphasis on the building of language skills. The background of scholars includes mostly from the social science disciplines; History, Political Science, Economics, Sociology, International Relations and language.

Several students of the centre have been recipients of prestigious research fellowships awarded by Japan Foundation, Mombusho (Ministry of Education, Government of Japan), Saburo Okita Memorial Fellowship, Nippon Foundation, Korea Foundation, Nehru Memorial Fellowship, and Fellowship from the Chinese and Taiwanese Governments. Besides, students from Japan receive fellowship from the Indian Council of Cultural Relations.