Center for South Asia

Recipients of The Manitowoc Company, Inc. Pre-dissertation Travel Award 2008

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Adam Auerbach

Department of Political Science

 

Project:

Democratic Decentralization, Party Politics, and Ethnic Fractionalization in India

 

The central focus of Adam’s research concerns the manner in which the process of democratic decentralization in patronage democracies alters the logic of group formation at the local level and the aggregation of identities and interests in coalition politics to higher levels of governance.

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Sarbani Chakraborty

Department of Curriculum and Instruction, School of Education

Project:

Exploration of the status of government school teachers and their teaching: A study of three government schools in India

 

Sarbani’s proposed research question is: Why are government schoolteachers in India not ‘teaching’?. She proposes a sociological re-reading of this phenomenon of not-teaching in government schools by exploring the social and politico-economic processes of the elementary-school teaching at work, within the dominant discourse of efficiency, effective-ness and student outcomes.

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Gregg M. Jamison

Department of Anthropology, Archaeology

 

Project:

The Organization of Harappan Steatite Seal Production

 

Gregg's study aims to improve our knowledge of South Asia ’s earliest state-level society and its legacy in other fields of study. His research will focus on the production of a specific type of artifact in the Indus Valley or Harappan civilization (2600-1900 B.C.) and its relationship to social and political organization and control. Among the most important artifacts of the Harappan cities are the inscribed seals made of steatite. Seals would have been used by Harappan elites as symbols of wealth and power, used in part to reinforce the social order. He notes that despite the significance of these artifacts, many questions remain regarding how production varied both within and among sites. Gregg's research is directed towards understanding how seal production was organized in the Indus cities. The data will then be used to test current models of the sociopolitical organization of the Indus civilization and refine our understanding of the organizational dynamics of the world's earliest state-level societies.

 

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Abdul Rehman Khan

Development Studies

 

Project:

Madrassa (faith based schools) vs Formal education in Pakistan

 

Rehman is planning to study changes in tribal and religious social relations and their effects on schooling opportunities and choices. Specifically, he hopes to examine whether in Balochistan there has been a shift in power way from the local, tribal ‘Jirga System’ and its leaders and towards religious institutions and leaders; and if so, what effects this is having on education opportunities and choices that families make for their children.

 

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H William Warner

Department of History

 

Project:

Players in the Great Game: British Travelers in Nineteenth Century Afghanistan

 

William’s research concerns the production and development of knowledge regarding the geographic, economic and political relationship between British India and the states beyond their northwest frontier in the nineteenth century. Relying upon travel accounts from British agents and Afghan court histories between 1810 and 1841, he hopes to address a number of important topics that have yet to be studied.