[Urbanstudy] "Writing the City" Workshop in Delhi, Feb. 11

[Rashmi Sadana]

The Nehru Memorial Museum and Library
cordially invites you to a Workshop
at 9:30 a.m. on Saturday, 11 February 2012
in the Seminar Room, First Floor, Library Building
on
'Writing the City: Narrative Form and Researching the Everyday'
in collaboration with
Dr. Rashmi Sadana
(Independent Researcher and Author, English Heart, Hindi Heartland)
 
In the last ten years there have been a number of non-fiction and academic narratives about Indian cities, especially Mumbai and Delhi (including Suketu Mehta’s Maximum City, Ravi Sundaram’s Pirate Modernity, Gyan Prakash’s Mumbai Fables, Sonia Faleiro's Beautiful Thing, Siddhartha Deb’s The Beautiful and the Damned and Aman Sethi’s A Free Man). These narratives not only attempt to capture what is new about liberalized Indian life, but also aim to understand the histories of cities while undertaking ethnographies of them, through long-term interviews and relationships, participant observation, and historical research. Moreover, within these texts there is analysis, exegesis, and the creation of characters. “Writing the city” refers to how these narratives herald a new way of conceptualizing the past, the present, and, invariably, the future of Indian cities. In this workshop, the aim is to consider how different narrative forms regarding the city create new ways of understanding and practicing the kind of research both necessary and desirable to write about cities. What, for instance, is the line between in-depth, long-term, and long-form journalism and ethnographic study? Are these differences in style, critical engagement, or the nature of research itself? How are urban communities defined and delineated in the process? Whose stories are told and in what context? What are the ethics of such engagements?
 
Programme Schedule
9.30 am
Workshop Opening and Welcome by Prof. Mahesh Rangarajan, Director, NMML
 
9.45 am
Opening Remarks by Dr. Rashmi Sadana (Workshop Organiser)
 
“Writing the City: Narrative Form and Researching the Everyday”
 
10.00 - 11.00 am
Session I
Calcutta / Kolkata
Chair: Dr. Anindita Chakrabarty (Sociologist, IIT Kanpur)
1) Aveek Sen (Senior Editor, The Telegraph)
“Connections: Looking, Thinking and Writing in the City"
Discussant: Dr. Ananya Vajpeyi (Visiting Fellow, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies)
11.00 - 11.30 am
TEA
 
11.30 – 1.15 pm
Session II
Bombay / Mumbai
Chair: Dr. Veena Naregal, (Cultural Historian, Institute of Economic Growth)
1) Naresh Fernandes (Consulting Editor, TimeOut India / Poesis Fellow, Institute of Public Knowledge)
“Listening to Bombay from the Wings”
2) Dr. Shilpa Phadke (Sociologist, Tata Institute of Social Sciences)
“Writing Gender into the City”
Discussant: Dr. Ranjani Mazumdar (Film Scholar, Jawaharlal Nehru University)
 
1.15 -  2.15 pm
Lunch
 
2.15 - 4.00 pm
Session III
 
Dilli / Delhi
Chair: Harini Narayanan (Urban Geographer, IES Abroad)
1) Urvashi Butalia (Publisher, Zubaan)
“Learning Delhi: Some Episodes and a Historical Narrative”
2) Rana Dasgupta (Author of Solo and Tokyo Cancelled)
“Imagining Delhi through Interviews”
Discussant: Dr. Deepak Mehta (Sociologist, Delhi School of Economics)
 
4.00 - 4.15pm
Closing Thoughts
 
 
TEA
 
 
 
All are welcome but advance intimation will be much appreciated as it will help us with arrangements including lunch.
 
Those wishing to have their names added to the e-mail list may please e-mail us at: nmmldirector at gmail.com
 
Address: Nehru Memorial Museum & Library, Teen Murti House, New Delhi.
 
Please note that the nearest Metro Stations are Race Course and Central Secretariat and the key DTC bus numbers 620, 604, 680, and 720. Autos are also easily available at these stations.
 
Note: There is an elevator for the First Floor for those who may need to use it.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/urbanstudygroup/attachments/20120131/71ca3a25/attachment-0001.html>