Organized by the Department of English and American Studies for teachers and researchers working in the field of postcolonial modernities, this pedagogy workshop is the fourth and final in a series of theme-based workshops on diversity in the classroom that have been planned within the DAAD-funded Postcolonial Chair in Global Modernities scheme.India in the 1990s saw a dramatic expansion in policies to reserve seats in institutes of higher education for students from historically disadvantaged castes and tribal communities. Up to 50 percent of students in the classroom of a public funded university today come from this background. While the opening up of the university space in such a big way to so many first-generation learners naturally led to greater scrutiny and critique of everyday practices comprising university life, the last decade has also seen the university emerge as a site for formulating wider questions about gender, sexuality, secularism, and caste. These questions have gained special urgency in the context of an intensifying neoliberal regime of privatization and corporatization (including of the universities), shrouded in the rhetoric of a sectarian, divisive and aggressive (Hindu) nationalism. Even as students around the country have come out in large numbers to support the people’s struggles to defend their lives and livelihoods against these policies, the classroom itself in the interim has emerged as a site where social faultlines are starting to show in unprecedented ways.

The first part of this workshop, 4-6 pm (CEST) includes a panel of three speakers from India who will reflect on the politics, practices and principles that help sustain the classroom as a space for being able to speak across the great divide, paying special attention to questions of religion, sexuality and  caste. Short presentations by Simona Sawhney (IIT-Delhi, New Delhi), Priya Kumar (University of Delhi, New Delhi), & Brinda Bose (Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi) will be followed by a round of open discussion.

The second part of the workshop, 6-7 pm (CEST), will look more closely at the materiality of the text: How might we enlist typography as an ally of the teacher in her activist avatar? Roman Wilhelm, Berlin-based communication designer and researcher, will walk us through his typographic interventions in support of the people’s movement for Democracy in Hong Kong.

 

With

Ira Raja, Potsdam Postcolonial Chair for Global Modernities
Simona Sawhney, IIT-Delhi
Brinda Bose, Jawaharlal Nehru University
Priya Kumar, University of Delhi
Roman Wilhelm, Berlin