We are excited to announce that the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, IIT Jodhpur is starting the seminar series for this year. Our first speaker will be Dr. Rowena Robinson, who is a Professor of Sociology at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, and has taught earlier at Delhi University and Jawaharlal Nehru University. Among other publications, she is author of Boundaries of Religion (Oxford University Press, 2013) and Tremors of violence (Sage, 2005) and editor of Minority Studies (Oxford University Press, 2012). She is co-editor with Marianus Joseph Kujur of Margins of Faith: Dalit and tribal Christianity in India (Sage Publications, 2010) and with Sathianathan Clarke of Religious conversion in India: modes, motivations, and meanings (Oxford University Press, 2003). She has also published journal articles in the areas of ethnic conflict, Christianity, and issues of constitutional law. 

Title: Fraternity and Civility: What is Ambedkar saying to us? 

Abstract:

Civility is a much-discussed concept in scholarship today. This presentation thinks about what constitutes the content of civility while seeking to reduce our reliance on Western understandings. My thinking on this subject is framed by constitutional values and from that perspective, I perceive the 'civility-trust' dyad as lying at the core of the constitutional value of fraternity, about which Ambedkar spoke in the Constituent Assembly. He gives content to a fraternity which can then be employed to think through our understanding of civility. It is argued here that fraternity as equality undergirded by a certain trust may be tapped in order to reinvent civility for contemporary India. We can then think about the spaces wherein this civility needs to be cultivated, and today I am focusing on our spaces, the spaces of higher education in the country, for the constitution of the fraternal citizen.  

Detail of talk:

http://iitj.ac.in/uploaded_docs/dept_upload/hss/Seminar series 1_document-2021-01-12-13-08-pm.pdf