After a very positive experience that was the meeting of the 3rd European South Asia PHD Workshop in Edinburgh, this year the Department of Political Science at the Heidelberg University hosted this event. The organization had been carried out by Professor Subrata K. Mitra and his graduate students, in particular Markus Pauli. The two days of intense meeting, presenting papers and discussions went extremely well, without a single glitch. In all, it was a stimulating experience for both students and staff members.
South Asia Institute is a very resourceful institution. Dr. Eleonore Schmitt gave us a thorough introduction to the South Asia Institute Library and its collections and digital resources. Two different venues were equipped with video projectors and excellent coffee, tea and other refreshments and edibles kept us alert during those long two days of discussions and hard thinking.
The format of the workshop was decided at the Edinburgh meeting and first applied in Heidelberg. Is seems well suited for the purpose, which is to provide the students with maximum quality feedback on their work in progress (often a chapter of the PHD thesis). The format is the following: the papers (no longer than 5000 words) are pre-circulated at least one or two weeks before the workshop. Each PHD student presents another student’s paper (10 min). Then one of the staff members provides critical remarks/comments on the paper (10 min) before giving the opportunity to the student to respond (5 min). The general discussion is then engaged for at least 15 to 20 minutes. The rule is that the staff members do not comment their students’ papers before the general discussion. The workshop gathers together 12 to 15 students and 4 to 5 staff members. The duration is two days.
The rigorous time schedule was not always followed, and it didn’t have to. Some presentations were longer, some comments were shorter and the time was adjustable. It was the quality of discussion that the workshop privileged.
All the papers arrived on time (a week before the workshop).The fact that the paper was presented by another student was salutary. The points summarized by somebody else seemed to have given the students a new sense of their own topic direction. The staff critiques were always frank, but fair and were geared to encourage further student research. The fact that the students presented papers written from another discipline and with topics that were far from their own academic interest, was not a problem at all. On the contrary, the students were able to see more clearly the inconsistencies in the argument and pinpoint analytical unevenness. The result of such a deep engagement with the student writing (by another student and a staff member) was a very high quality of critique and ensuing discussion. It was also stimulating to hear students find affinities with other student’s topics and methodology. After the sessions, the discussions went on and certain key topics cropped up again and again.
Importance of face-to-face dialogue in academia
Professor Subrata Mitra started his inaugural talk with a quotation from the Allgemeine Zeitung denouncing academic conferences and jetsetter academics who collect miles on their frequent flyer programs with international airline companies. The authors claimed that in the era of cyber media, the researchers may just as well stay in the offices instead of spending (taxpayer’s) money on “having a vacation” in another place. This hostile and uninformed journalist basically argued for “reading the research articles at home”. Speaking with undisguised irony, Professor Mitra invited the participants of the workshop to test and reflect on whether there is any truth to this opinion.
What the workshop amply showed is that this kind of opinions are misguided (and hostile) and show downright misunderstanding of our research procedures and habits. It actually goes against recent research conclusions by the historians and sociologists of science (S. Shapin, B. Latour, etc.) who all showed to what extent sociability (or “the Republic of Letters” as they used to call it in the early modern period) defines research topics and methodology not only in “soft” sciences such as ours, but also in “hard” sciences.
In this workshop, we all participated in designing the “future” of social sciences in/on South Asia by reflecting on the appropriate topics to study and on the shortcomings or advantages of certain analytical and methodological tools. In a word, we were thinking about what should be done, rather than what is done currently in our fields. It is this prospective (rather than retrospective) feature, an “added value” as Professor Mitra would say, that gave our workshop its most important quality. There is a close connection (correlation) between the way students construct their own intellectual careers and the general advancement of research on South Asia (or any other field).
As Professor Mitra lucidly remarked – “when they ask me what is my field, I tell them that only donkeys have a field” – thinking exclusively in terms of one’s own field or discipline is neither possible nor helpful in our scientific village. In spite of the fact that our workshop consisted of students of political sciences, geography, history, indology, sociology and anthropology, we all found a common ground, and profited from each other’s slightly different or specific points of view. As is visible from the Annex, the students and the staff members were from different countries and different universities, presenting a wide range of topics, but the most important fact is that we all spoke sufficiently efficient common language – English. Whether we want it or not, English is the lingua franca for all those involved in South Asian social science research field. Having personally been taught indology in Croatian, I know the risk of insularity.
Student comments and appreciations of the workshop Informal comments and appreciations were expressed in unsystematic way in the final discussion. Nevertheless, they are extremely interesting and may help the organizers (CESA in Paris) of the next year’s workshop.
a) The students appreciated in particular the transdisciplinary setting (Radu Carciumaru).
b) Some suggested that for the next session the students should mention their larger PhD topic and how far advanced their research is. This is to avoid a common disclaimer of – “Oh, this is in another chapter”.
c) Muhammad Asif Khan who presented a paper reflecting on the role and the predicament of the “native” anthropologist and stressed the feeling (epistemological as much as private) of doubt, remarked that “he was brought to the limit of the doubt when someone else presented his text”. He found it very helpful.
d) Luke Heslop commented on the dialogical dimension of the workshop by saying that the intimacy in the setting and the speed of the response is what makes the workshop so important.
e) Subrata Mitra was delighted that his students received comments and critiques from the outside staff members.
f) Silke Bechler said that the workshop opened her eyes on what is really missing in her paper and that it was good to be with people who locate themselves on the border of a discipline. “We feel like being stretched”.
Planning and organizing the next workshop CESA in Paris offered to be the next venue for the 5th European South Asia PhD Workshop in late August or early September 2011. The European Association for South Asian Study provides a grant of 500 E towards the accommodation of the graduate students. The accommodation of the staff members and the meals of the participants are to be provided by the CESA. The travel expenses are not included and are paid by the participants themselves.
This, I believe, is a great opportunity for the CESA to gain further visibility in the transnational doctoral networks that increasingly structure today’s research in social sciences. Involving the key players in the existing French PhD programs in this meeting is one of CESA’s objectives. It is also crucial to ensure the visibility of such events on websites (with programs, papers etc.) and to invite other doctoral students and scholars to attend the meeting. The CESA may also want to take advantage of this meeting to link up invited doctoral students with the AJEI (Association des jeunes Etudes indiennes), a time-tested student organization that has a strong European potential.
You can download the report in pdf-format here.
For further information, please contact Mr. Markus Pauli: pauli@asia-europe.uni-heidelberg.de
