AR 2009-10 - Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta

papers are i) “Choice, life and the (m)other: towards ethics in/of abortion” inHuman Rights and Ethics: Conceptual Analysis and Contextual Obligations.,Shashi Motilal, (ed) Anthem Press, an academic imprint of WimbledonPublishing Company ii) “The History of Calcutta Medical College” (coauthoredby Samita Sen) for the book Science and Modern India: AnInstitutional History c. 1784-1947, ed., Uma Dasgupta, PHISPC (Project ofHistory of Indian Science, Philosophy and Culture) series; iii) , “AestheticizingLaw into Justice: The Fetus in a Divided Planet” in a volume of essays onAesthetics and the Representation of Justice to be edited by Etienne Balibar,and Ranabir Samaddar; iv) A different version of “Sexual Difference inLiterary Historiography: Writing the Nation in “My Life”” was submitted toInterventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies. The peer reviewsare favourable and he is currently making the final changes for publication.Keya Dasgupta has been associated with a project on a comparative studyof three Indian and three South African cities on “Participation and UrbanGovernance in India and South Africa”, taken up by the Centre de Sciences,Humaines de New Delhi. The work has been completed. Her owncontributions to the project are papers on: i) The Hawkers’ Movement inKolkata; ii) Interrogating the Right to the City: Community Participation andthe Spaces of the ‘Legal’ in Contemporary Kolkata; iii) Between the Spacesof the Invented and Invited: The Politics of Negotiation in ContemporaryKolkata; and iv) From participation to research: Three divergent perspectivesin Contemporary Kolkata. She also prepared, as part of this project, a seriesof maps on developments in Contemporary Kolkata. The themes rangedfrom the city’s land-use; electoral behaviour; planned projects; sites ofeviction/protest; sites of selected development projects; sites of land usechanges: from industry to real estate, from bazaars to malls; etc. MollicaDastider completed three papers on i) Liberal Dilemma with Difference:Muslims in a Western Democracy to be published in CSSSC OccasionalPaper No. 179; ii) Refusing to Choose: The Muslim Madhesis and theCoexistence of Religious and Regional in Nepal’s Tarai which will appearas a chapter in the forthcoming Book: Nationalism and Ethnic Conflict Editedby Susan Hangen and Mahendra Lawoti, Taylor and Francis (Routledge)London; iii) “Voices from the Margins: The Deconstruction of caste Nepaliculture in East Himalayas” to be published in Social Science Probings, NewDelhi in their forthcoming Special Issue on Minorities. Sohini Guhacompleted two papers on i) Multiethnic Transformation and AsymmetricRepresentation: The Bahujan Samaj Party in North India and ii) EmbeddedParties and Democratization: Exploring the Association Anew. ManabiMajumdar has almost completed a book manuscript (jointly with Jos Mooij)on education and inequality in India. In addition to the chapters written before,she has worked particularly on two aspects. First, she has done an analysisof a few sets of textbooks that are used in primary classes in the State ofWest Bengal, making an argument about a kind of synergy between qualityand equality issues. Second, drawing upon the research in the States ofAndhra Pradesh and West Bengal, she has explored the idea of educationalactivism and counter-power that may work to challenge the tight link betweeneducation and power. Priya Sangameswaran made a brief foray into twotopics – environmental security and corruption, each of which resulted in apaper. The paper on environmental security titled Extending the SecurityDiscourse to the Environment and Water was presented in a conferenceorganized by Maulana Abdul Kalam Azad Institute of Asian Studies, Kolkatain collaboration with the Centre for Social Sciences and Humanities,University of Calcutta and will be published shortly in Asia Annual 2009.The paper on corruption, titled Corruption in the Age of Neoliberalism: TheCase of Rural Drinking Water Projects in Western India was prepared forthe CODESRIA/SEPHIS Equity Policy Dialogue on ‘Corruption: CriticalPerspectives from the South’, October 1-3, 3009 and would be publishedas part of a book being brought out by SEPHIS.ONGOING PROJECTSEconomicsPranab Kumar Das is currently working on financial system architecture ofSouth and South East Asia. This study pertains to the nature of the coevolutionof different institutions of the financial system, such as banks,stock market, insurance companies and the nature of causal relations amongthemselves and with the real sector. The development of an econometricmodel to capture the commonalities and differences across countries in acommon framework has been completed. The estimation and inferenceare underway. This will help build up a theory of comparative financial systemof the developing and emerging market economies which is an open areaof research in the filed. He is also working on a model of exchange ratedynamics and external capital inflow which is a joint work with Gopal KirshnaBasak of the Stat.-Math Unit of Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata. In thiswork they tried to capture the terms of trade effect of capital inflow on theexchange rate and external interest rate in a multi period framework.Apart from the above mentioned research he is continuing his work on firminvestment in India. He has been working on a small paper on R&D4 5