Annual Winter Course on Research Methodology (December 15-19, 2014)
Theme: Roots and Bridges: Practicing Interdisciplinarity in Research on Northeast India
Organised by: Tata Institute of Social Sciences (Guwahati Campus); Indian Institute of
Technology, Guwahati; Cotton College State University, Guwahati; Tezpur (Central) University;
St. Joseph’s College, Jakhama; Center for South Asia, Stanford University; Department of
Development Studies, University of New South Wales and Department of Social Anthropology,
and Stockholm University.
Rationale: This research methodology workshop is an attempt to collate contemporary social
science research on Northeast India and subject them to critical engagements with similar
developments in other parts of the world. It has been designed to help local research students in
the different research institutions within the region, as well as others from different parts of the
country but whose works focus on Northeast India.
The idea of the workshop is to combine keynote addresses on the themes specified below, while
allowing researchers to share their pre-submission work with mentors in a distance-education
format. Applicants will be asked to provide the organizers with an essay that reflects their time
in the field and key research questions. They will then have a chance to have detailed feedback
from mentors who have written extensively on the themes (elaborated below), both in the form
of a compendium of current readings, as well as direct contact in the course of the methodology
workshop.
Thematic Concerns: “Roots and Bridges” is a phrase that represents an abstract coalescing of
research work on the region. While there has been a concerted effort to look for historical
material and root causes of social change, contemporary scholarship has also begun to look at
bridges between communities, cultures and economies that tie the region to its transnational
neighbourhood. Riding this analogy, the methodology workshop will concentrate on bringing
together an inter-disciplinary process and team that reflects the rootedness (to disciplinary issues)
and bridges (across methods), to mentor the research students. The themes and their brief
rationale are:
(a) Gender, culture and social change: There has been at least three decades of sociological
and literary work on women’s role in engendering social and political change in the
region. This work is further reinforced by the recent upsurge in women writers from
Northeast India. Therefore, the methodology workshop would encourage applications
that resonate with this theme.
(b) Citizenship and Peoplehood: Both concepts have been at opposing ends of a spectrum of
enquiry about the persistence of identity movements and violence in the region.
Contemporary research and scholarship, both within Northeast and outside, have
consistently plotted out how lived realities fall into different parts of the larger spectrum,
while not necessarily stand in opposition to one another. The workshop will encourage
researchers working in these areas.
(c) Migration: In recent times, migration has elicited both a civic and academic interest,
mostly due to the political implications of the subject. It has transcended disciplines in
every sense. The cause-effect, host-guest binaries, though still seminal in laying out the
contours of the debate, is also being challenged by contemporary scholarship that is
discussed in the other thematic concerns of the workshop.
(d) Development and Livelihoods: Northeast India is currently on the cusp of an economic
transformation that encapsulates the dilemmas of development for its inhabitants. Given
its hitherto rural base, livelihoods too have been associated with activities associated with
agriculture, livestock and other allied sectors. The rapid changes induced in the last three
decades need to be critically examined from different lenses and the workshop will
encourage applicants working on the subject.
(e) Biodiversity: In recent times, the region’s biodiversity has been addressed not only by
natural scientists, but social science professionals as well. Riding on the emerging,
cutting edge scholarship and research that merges the two, the workshop will endeavor to
offer innovative methods for researchers who are concerned about questions of
sustainability and challenges of/to the region’s biodiversity.