about course schedules

We have a fairly intense time ahead of us, with instructors from various disciplines employing pedagogic strategies that might reflect or engage with research on interdisciplinarity; in other words - how to bring in methodological insights from other disciplines, and how that might change the face of one's own discipline. Further, is it possible to translate this into teaching. For the first month, in August, we have the following instructors -
Tejaswini Niranjana - Senior Fellow, Centre for the Study of Culture and Society, Bangalore
Sanil V., - Professor, IIT Delhi
Rajan Gurukkal - Vice Chancellor, M.G. University, Kottayam
Rajeev Bhargava - Director, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, New Delhi

More details will be up soon, and looking forward to your participation.

"Production of Knowledge in the Natural and Social Sciences" - 3rd edition begins August 7, 2010

Disciplinary knowledge, as all knowledge itself, has traditionally been seen as uncontaminated by context, or by overlaps with other disciplinary methodologies. The physical and natural sciences among these have also traditionally been seen as building on universal principles that are cross-culturally active. “Society” and “culture” are therefore marked as outsiders to knowledge-making in the natural sciences that concentrate on “nature” as their object of study. Parallel to this, the social sciences and humanities have carried the onus of attention to “society” and “culture”, with the added work of devising universal principles to analyze the same. Given the hierarchies set in place between disciplines during their formation in Euro-American contexts in the 18^th-19^th centuries, the apparent “failure” of the social sciences to devise such universal principles has been the continuing source of separation between these sets of disciplines; this has also been accompanied by a belief that the natural sciences should deal with explanation and the social sciences with interpretation.

In the movement toward newer approaches to disciplinary knowledge, it has been recognized that there is such a thing as contexts for knowledge generation, so that “society” and “culture” begin to be attached to “nature”. The earlier stark separations between the natural and social sciences, therefore, cannot hold. Sometimes this has produced whole new fields of inquiry, challenges to conventional disciplinary methodologies, and a general porosity of disciplinary boundaries.

The course on “Production of Knowledge in the Natural and Social Sciences”, co-hosted by Centre for Contemporary Studies (CCS), IISc, Bangalore and Centre for the Study of Culture and Society (CSCS), Bangalore, has been trying over the past 2 years to explore just what is meant by these porosities, how far they are useful, how canonical fields might respond to methodological challenges, and most importantly, the pedagogic challenges involved in curricularising these challenges. The philosophy of the course has moved, since 2006, from trying to break down canonical disciplinary walls, valuing dissent and defection from disciplines as a source of criticality, to a sense that changing how one’s own discipline is done is the useful task perhaps of interdisciplinarity. It is this particular challenge that the 2010 edition of the course will take up, to actually set up disciplinary modules from the natural and social sciences as exemplars of integrated thinking and teaching, where particular disciplines are challenged not so much by information about new objects of inquiry, but reworked with methodological inputs and insights from ‘other’ fields/ disciplines. This also means a respect for the usefulness of disciplinary boundaries that yet does not remain mired in the stereotypes and moral obligations attributed to them. Inevitably, the meanings of and investment in terms such as “inter-disciplinarity” and “integration” will also come up for debate.

The course will be multi-instructor and held every Saturday from 2 to 5 p.m. in the Centre for Contemporary Studies seminar hall on the campus of the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore. The course will be conducted in an interactive, seminar format. While we welcome individuals to sign up for the whole course, we would also welcome individuals who might wish to attend any particular modules of their interest. The concept note and tentative schedule of the course will be made available soon on our website, and the program for each week will also be announced separately. The inaugural session and introductory module of the course will be held on Saturday, 7th August, 2010 at 2.00 p.m. The introductory modules will be taught by Prof. Tejaswini Niranjana (CSCS) and Prof. Sanil V (IIT Delhi). Individuals desiring to sign up for the whole course are encouraged to e-mail Prof. Raghavendra Gadagkar (ragh_at_ces.iisc.ernet.in) with cc to Dr. Asha Achuthan (asha.achuthan_at_gmail.com) There is no registration fee.

We are starting a blog titled “on knowing how” at http://onknowinghow.blogspot.com/ which will carry all information about the course, including module summaries, as also invite discussions based on individual modules, the course theme, and associated preoccupations. We hope this will be a place to listen in, to listen, and to contribute …

Welcome all J