By TwoCircles.net news desk,
New Delhi: With the Indian Ocean now emerging as a major unit of study in both national and international universities and with the growing importance of India and the Asian economies in the globalized world of the Indian Ocean, India’s prestigious Jamia Millia Islamia University has launched multi-disciplinary Indian Ocean Studies Programme (IOSP).
To be located in Jamia’s Academy of Third World Studies, IOSP will promote research and doctoral work as well as foster academic exchanges with partner institutions in the country and overseas.
“Identifying Indian Ocean studies as an emerging priority is a concrete expression of Jamia’s commitment to stronger and deeper south-south relations and to supporting new shifts in the study of the Indian Ocean,” says the university.
“From being the terrain of historians who for decades painstakingly reconstructed the history of the Indian Ocean from their relative vantage points of location – territorial and institutional – the ocean has now become a major site for multi-disciplinary deliberations drawing in sociologists, cultural studies scholars and even performance specialists attempting to map their fields in the Indian Ocean,” the university says.
The program will support emerging research and disseminate it as widely as possible through a network of national and international institutions and through exchange programs, collaborative research, colloquia and workshops for doctoral students.
The IOSP will invite and support research under the following four categories:
Connections between India and the littoral countries of the Indian Ocean on historical and current issues
Build an ethnographic data base on indigenous nautical traditions and boat building
Study regimes of circulation, of diaspora in the Indian Ocean and link these up with similar initiatives in University of Roskilde, Denmark and University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg (Jamia has already established preliminary contacts with the universities).
Formation of a transnational public sphere encompassing the Indian Ocean through a study of newspapers and journals to Haj narratives.
IOSP will support scholars working in either of these fields assisting them also with fundraising and institutional collaboration with partner institutions. Teaching activity will be in collaboration with teaching departments and centers at Jamia. This would cover modules like Indian Ocean history, Diaspora studies including diaspora literature and Cultural studies relating to the Indian Ocean
IOSP will also forge links with institutions in India, namely the CHS in J.N.U, the Institute of Maths Sciences, Chennai and the Society for Indian Ocean studies in New Delhi. It will try to liaise with the Indian Navy and the geography departments in the University of Mumbai, says a statement from the university.