The South Asia Research Network (SARN) has been created to promote the production, exchange and dissemination of basic research knowledge in the social sciences and humanities. The South Asia program of the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) has set up this electronic network in an effort to facilitate access to scarce academic resources and to enable dialogue and exchange between scholars who work in and on all countries of South Asia.
SARN hosts information on academic journals, reviews, archives, and libraries. It offers links to electronic publications, research notes and abstracts, and to leading research centres in the region.
The Social Science Research Council (SSRC) is a not-for-profit, independent international council dedicated to furthering scholarship and basic research worldwide. The SSRC is committed to promoting exchange and dialogue across a global community of scholars in all disciplines of the social sciences and humanities. For more information see www.ssrc.org.
2005-06 was the final year of the South Asia Regional Fellowship Program (SARFP), a Ford Foundation (Delhi office) funded multi-year project that has awarded fellowships to a total of 58 academic researchers based in the South Asian region since its inception in 2002. The final year’s theme, "The ‘Long’ 1950s," proposed to examine the 1950s as the starting point for the making of post-colonial South Asia, the moment when a radically new set of political, economic and socio-cultural transformations and institutions were being set in place. This examination is necessary both to better understand that very important (and relatively understudied) period as well as to set the stage more effectively for understanding the present. The year’s cohort of 18 fellows included scholars from Nepal, Sri Lanka, Pakistan and India. The fellows were chosen from 59 applicants by a selection committee comprised of senior scholars of South Asia from a variety of disciplines whose own work was relevant to the fellowship theme.
As a major activity in this grant period, the program organized a capstone fellows’ workshop held in Goa, India in November 2006. The objective of the workshop was to facilitate continued interaction among fellows and to foster ideas and networks for future collaborative and comparative research in/on the region. Accordingly, the workshop offered fellows an opportunity to develop and present comparative and collaborative research on the major themes of the fellowship program: Resources and Society; Migration; Boundaries of Bodies, States and Societies; and The ‘Long’ 1950s. A call for papers circulated to present and former SARFP fellows invited submissions of collaborative papers based on their South Asia Regional Fellowship research project, that explore any one of the fellowship themes in a comparative, inter-regional framework.
Eight teams of collaborative researchers were selected to present their comparative projects at the conference, out of a total of 13 submissions received by the application deadline of August 31, 2006. The projects represented an innovative mix of paired comparisons of South Asian countries, and generated a fruitful discussion about the opportunities and challenges of undertaking comparative and collaborative research on South Asia.
In 2007-2008, the South Asia program is organizing two projects aimed at the consolidation and enhancement of a community of social science research in South Asia. Both are funded by the Ford Foundation’s Delhi office.
I. Collaborative Research Grants Competition
The SSRC has announced a small grants competition for collaborative research in and on South Asia that builds upon the research presentations at the Goa capstone workshop for SARFP fellows. The eight teams from the capstone workshop were invited to submit proposals for a collaborative research grant. The funds are intended to support more sustained research activities (for e.g. the purchase of relevant books and reference material), and to enable research partners to have at least two or three face-to-face meetings with each other in order to develop their research collaboration.
Following the announcement of selection results, grant recipients have approximately six months to produce a publishable paper that explores the comparative dimension of their research question in fuller detail. Teams will also present their papers at an upcoming international conference on "Inter-Asian Connections."
II. International Conference on Inter-Asian Connections
The SSRC is organizing an international conference on "Inter-Asian Connections" where scholars of South Asia will have an opportunity to participate in and build new intra-regional and inter-regional networks of scholarship and intellectual exchange.
To be held in Dubai on February 21-24, 2008, this international conference will bring together South Asia scholars who are interested in furthering the comparative and inter-regional dimensions of their research, and scholars of other parts of Asia who have similar comparative and inter-regional interests. A notable innovation of the conference is to reconceptualize "Asia" as an interlinked historical and geographical formation stretching from the Middle East through Eurasia to East Asia. This expanded understanding should bring to the fore new and unanticipated research themes and cross-regional/trans-regional connections and formations. For more details please refer to Inter-Asian Connections.
Several new projects are in development for the SSRC South Asia Program. Please revisit these pages soon to learn about them.
