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Wednesday, December 3, 2014

30th Anniversary of the Bhopal Gas Leak Disaster

Today marks the 30th anniversary of the world's worst industrial disaster, a poisonous gas leak at the Union Carbide fertilizer factory in Bhopal, India. Some half million people were affected by the leak. Thousands died during the event and its immediate aftermath. After 30 years, the tragedy is still unfolding: survivors continue to suffer and to struggle for medical relief, compensation and justice. The plant itself remains a toxic site that continues to contaminate the groundwater.

Below are links to further information:

Wednesday, November 26, 2014

Talk Friday, Dec. 5: Muddying the Waters: Coauthoring Feminisms across Scholarship and Activism by Richa Nagar

Muddying the Waters: Coauthoring Feminisms across Scholarship and Activism

Richa Nagar
Gender Women and Sexuality Studies
University of Minnesota

Date:  Friday, December 5, 2014
Time:  1:30pm
Place: Crosby Seminar Room, 240 Northrop
 Free and open to the public,  Reception follows.

Richa Nagar will read from her new book Muddying the Waters (2014).

In Muddying the Waters, Richa Nagar embarks on an eloquent and moving exploration of the promises and pitfalls she has encountered during her two decades of transnational feminist work.

With stories, encounters, and anecdotes as well as methodological reflections, Nagar grapples with the complexity of working through solidarities, responsibility, and ethics while involved in politically engaged scholarship. Experiences that range from the streets of Dar es Salaam to farms and development offices in North India inform discussion of the labor and politics of coauthorship, translation, and genre blending in research and writing that cross multiple–and often difficult–borders. The author links the implicit assumptions, issues, and questions involved with scholarship and political action, and explores the epistemological risks and possibilities of creative research that bring these into intimate dialogue.

Daringly self-conscious, Muddying the Waters reveals a politically engaged researcher and writer working to become “radically vulnerable,” and the ways in which such radical vulnerability can allow a re-imagining of collaboration that opens up new avenues to collective dreaming and laboring across sociopolitical, geographical, linguistic, and institutional borders.

Sponsored by the Institute for Advanced Study and Gender Women and Sexuality Studies
For further information: http://ias.umn.edu/2014/12/05/nagar/

Monday, November 17, 2014

Sri Lankan Presidential and General Elections 2010 Web Archive (Library of Congress)

The Library of Congress has released a web archive collection of 28 web sites is entitled "Sri Lankan Presidential and General Elections 2010 Web Archive." It is available for use at the following URL:

http://lcweb2.loc.gov/diglib/lcwa/html/lkelec10/lkelec10-overview.html

This collection was prepared by the Library of Congress New Delhi Office and its Colombo sub office staff with technical assistance from the LOC Office of Strategic Initiatives.

Monday, October 27, 2014

Thursday Talk by Sudha Nagavarapu: "Learning from Movements" - please RSVP

"Learning from Movements"

Sudha Nagavarapu

Date:  Thursday, October 30, 2014
Time:  3:45-4:45 pm
Place: 230 Blegen Hall 
Details:
This talk will be held as part of CLA's humanistic commons freshman seminar on "Stories, Bodies, and Border crossings." 

About the speaker:
Sudha Nagavarapu is currently based in Bangalore and works on health rights and urban governance issues with communities in Bangalore and throughout Karnataka.  She also works with Sangtin Kisan Mazdoor Sangathan (SKMS) in Sitapur district, Uttar Pradesh, visiting them 2-3 times a year, supporting them in their current activities and helping expand their work in health and agriculture.  She has co-authored studies looking at urban health systems, the privatization and commercialization of health services (with a focus on Karnataka), access to medicines etc. and she is currently involved in a study looking at referrals for maternal care in Bangalore.

If you plan to attend, please RSVP to Richa Nagar (nagar@umn.edu) by Tue Oct 28th.

Thursday Talk by Dwiji Guru: Perspectives on Technology for Reshaping an Economy - please RSVP

Perspectives on Technology for Reshaping an Economy 

Dwijendra nath Guru
October 30, 2014
12:00 - 1:00
University International Center, room 101
(map)

The role of technology in shaping societies is evident. As time progresses, societies evolve and in some aspects look to change course. But in multiple sectors we find that the technological developments do not keep in step with these changes. Dwijendra nath Guru’s work is focused on developing solutions to help move communities toward a more equitable and just future. Dwijendra will share insights and ideas on the role of technology in the sectors of dairy, cotton, and staple grains in rural India.

Lunch will be provided, so please RSVP: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1DIbRuVVaR3GbwMnMklai9ieHQpxbWifNKb2wRuENx8M/viewform


South Asia Scholarly Events calendar 

AIIS summer 2015 and academic year 2015-2016 language programs in India

The American Institute of Indian Studies welcomes applications for its summer 2015 and academic year 2015-2016 language programs. Programs to be offered include Hindi (Jaipur), Bengali (Kolkata), Punjabi (Chandigarh), Tamil (Madurai); Marathi (Pune), Urdu (Lucknow), Telugu (Hyderabad), Gujarati (Ahmedabad), Kannada (Mysore), Malayalam (Thiruvananthapuram), Mughal Persian (Lucknow), Sanskrit (Pune) and Pali/Prakrit (Pune). We will offer other Indian languages upon request.

All academic year applicants should have the equivalent of two years of prior language study. For summer Sanskrit, we require the equivalent of two years of prior study; for summer Bengali, Hindi and Tamil we require the equivalent of one year of prior study. For summer Urdu, we require the equivalent of one year of either Hindi or Urdu. We can offer courses at all levels, including beginning, in other Indian languages for the summer.

Summer students should apply for FLAS if available at their institutions for funding to cover the costs of the program. Funding for Hindi, Punjabi and Urdu may be available through the U.S. State Department's CLS program (see www.clscholarship.org).  AIIS has some funding available for summer students who cannot procure FLAS or CLS funding. This funding is allocated on the basis of the language committee's ranking of the applicants. Academic year students are eligible to apply for an AIIS fellowship which would cover all expenses for the program. AIIS is also offering a fall semester program. We offer Hindi, Bengali and Urdu at all levels for the fall; we require two years of prior language study for other languages for the fall.

The application deadline is January 31, 2015.  Applications can be downloaded from the AIIS web site at www.indiastudies.org. For more information: Phone: 773-702-8638. Email: aiis@uchicago.edu.

Critical Language Scholarship Application Announcement


The U.S. Department of State is pleased to announce the opening of the scholarship competition for the 2015 Critical Language Scholarship (CLS) Program in thirteen critical foreign languages.

The CLS Program is a program of the U.S. Department of State, Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs. It is a fully-funded overseas language program for American undergraduate and graduate students. With the goal of broadening the base of Americans studying and mastering critical languages and to build relationships between the people of the United States and other countries, CLS provides study opportunities to a diverse range of students from across the United States at every level of language learning.

The thirteen CLS languages are: Arabic, Azerbaijani, Bangla, Chinese, Hindi, Indonesian, Japanese, Korean, Persian, Punjabi, Russian, Turkish, and Urdu.

Please note that participants in the CLS Program are not required to have any experience studying critical languages for most of the thirteen languages. Arabic, Chinese, Persian, Russian, and Japanese institutes have language prerequisites, which can be found on the CLS website: http://www.clscholarship.org.

The CLS Program seeks participants with diverse interests, from a wide variety of fields of study, backgrounds and career paths, with the purpose of representing the full diversity of professional, regional, cultural and academic backgrounds in the United States. Thus, students from all academic disciplines, including business, engineering, law, medicine, science, social sciences, arts and humanities are encouraged to apply.

There is no service requirement for CLS Alumni after the program. However, participants are expected to continue their language study beyond the scholarship period, and later apply their critical language skills in their professional careers. Participants are selected based on their commitment to language learning and plans to apply their language skills to their future academic or professional pursuits.

Please note that CLS is an intensive group-based language program.

The application is now live and available online at:  http://www.clscholarship.org

Applications will be due November 12, 2014 by 8:00 pm EST.

Prior to preparing their application, interested students should review the full eligibility and application information on the CLS Program website: http://www.clscholarship.org/information-for/applicants.

For news, updates and more information about the CLS Program, check out the CLS website or our Facebook page for updates!
CLS Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/CLScholarship

For questions, please contact us at: cls@americancouncils.org

Tuesday, June 17, 2014

The Wildnerness Library

At present, due to technical issues we remain unable to generate new titles lists.
In lieu of that we offer an interesting story of a special library in rural Kerala with no such issues:

The Wilderness Library

Friday, January 17, 2014

Exhibition: Imperial Nature: Flora, Fauna, and Colonialism in India

Imperial Nature: Flora, Fauna, and Colonialism in India

January 18 - April 20, 2014

Cargill Gallery
Minneapolis Institute of Arts
2400 Third Avenue South
Minneapolis, MN 55404

Free Admission

Two different approaches to understanding and depicting nature melded--with beguiling results--as the long interlacing of British and Indian cultures on the subcontinent deepened in the 17th and 18th centuries, an uneasy period of intensifying colonial rule. This exhibition showcases these unique representations of nature, commissioned by Indian princes and increasingly powerful European colonial patrons--an artistic and scientific confluence that forever reshaped the way we view the natural world.

The exhibition examines a wide variety of works commissioned by Indian princes and European elites, featuring works from two important New York collections and 11 never-before-exhibited "Lady Impey" paintings from the private collection of Elizabeth and Willard Clark. Lady Mary Impey, a British colonial in 18th century Calcutta, commissioned Indian painters to illustrate birds from her private menagerie, resulting in images that owe as much to European natural science as India's rich painterly tradition.