Events

Talks and Webinars

• Prof. Madhura Lohokare (CWS, OEFL), Prof. Shivani Kapoor (CWS, OEFL) and Prof. Jadumani Mahanand (JGLS) organised a panel discussion, ‘Caste in the Classroom’ with Prof. Ishaan Mukherjee (JSJC) and Prof. Sagnik Dutta (JGLS) as speakers on Friday, October 20, 2023. The speakers discussed how faculty and students negotiate and discuss caste discrimination and caste privileges in the classroom through pedagogical practices and experiences.
• Prof. Nupur Samuel organised a special lecture ‘Between the Motion and the Act: Spaces of Laughter in Chaplin’s Modern Times’ by Dr. Sayandeb Chowdhury, School of Interwoven Arts and Sciences (SIAS), Krea University on 12 October 2023. Through a close look at Charlie Chaplin’s almost silent Modern Times (1936), the talk discussed how the cinematic form encountered the technologised spaces of ‘modernity’, through repetitive, kafkaesque mobility.

Workshops

• Draft-a-thon: Writing the Field, November 2023
  The Centre for Writing Studies held “Draft-a-thon: Writing the Field,” a 3-day long intensive writing workshop for advanced doctoral research scholars in social sciences and humanities on 22 November- 24 November 2023. The workshop attended by seven doctoral scholars from across the country, invited the participants to work with a draft of a chapter from their Ph.D. dissertations through workshops conducted by CWS faculty.

University-wide Workshops

• • Prof. Nupur Samuel conducted a workshop titled, ‘Freewheeling Towards that Essay’, on October 19, 2023. Focusing on content over form, this workshop discussed how to play and work with ideas, with the intention of engaging with emerging ideas and developing mind-muscle endurance, for students struggling with beginning an essay or assignment or stuck with some ideas but nowhere close to the completing that essay.
  • Prof. Pankaj Challa conducted a workshop titled, ‘Authenticity’ in Film and Screenwriting on September 13, 2023. The interactive workshop discussed the key concept of authenticity in film and screenwriting—exemplified by the “authenticity” crisis in the Bombay film industry today. The discussion also touched on the implications of authenticity on writing in general that transcends genre.
  • Prof. Jyoti conducted a workshop titled, ‘‘Voice’ in Academic Writing’ on September 20, 2023. The hands-on workshop delved into the idea of ‘voice’ in academic writing. It was explained to the students that voice that might be confused with style and opinion is rather arrived after a scientific thought process and expressed through both logic and art.

Research Majlis, November 2023

The Centre for Writing Studies held a Research Majlis Retrospective on November 24, 2023. Research Majlis – a discursive forum hosted by the Centre for Writing Studies, JGU, completed eleven rounds this year. The Research Majlis Retrospective invited our previous speakers back to now focus on how they found, processed and wrote about evidence in their writing. The panel discussion included seven presentations by Vebhuti Duggal, AUD; Vidya Subramanian, JGU; Sushmita Pati, NLSUI; Shabeeh Rahat, Independent Academic; Madhura Lohokare, JGU; Jyoti, JGU and Devyani Gupta, JGU. The speakers addressed the question of evidence in academic writing through various methodologies such as ethnography, archival work, and literary discourse.

University-Wide Workshops
From Fall 2020, the CWS has been conducting a series of workshops on different aspects of reading and writing, open to the entire JGU student community. Every semester, faculty members of the CWS voluntarily conduct three workshops focusing on specific elements of academic writing.

The main objective behind this series is to reach out to students who might not have had the opportunity of taking a foundational course in writing. We also believe that simply taking one foundational course in writing is not adequate for students to consolidate their reading and writing skills adequately: this series also provides opportunity for students to revisit and revise some of their learnings from the writing course/s they might have earlier taken. Through this workshop series, the CWS faculty gets an opportunity to interact with and understand the needs of students across several schools, which in turn helps them to tweak and shape their writing pedagogy continually to make it dynamic and responsive.

These workshops have covered a wide range of topics including writing an abstract, writing effective introductions and conclusions, citation practices, reading strategies, working with claim and evidence, identifying the writerly voice and doing a review of literature. Till present, more than 250 students across the university have attended and benefitted from these workshops.

Fall 2020

Fall 2021

Fall 2022

Spring 2021

Spring 2022

Research Majlis
The CWS Research Majlis is a forum meant for the exchange of ideas amongst researchers from a wide range of disciplinary interests. The Research Majlis seeks to facilitate sharing of research – incipient as well as advanced – and the creation of a space for critical conversation between peers in the larger academic community. The Centre for Writing Studies is deeply invested in debates over pedagogies and politics of reading and writing. The Research Majlis is an intervention in linking these debates to contemporary research and to the ways in which academic and critical writing is being employed to reflect and negotiate with social and political issues around us. Keeping this in mind the Research Majlis also seeks to incorporate research work from areas of artistic research, creative and non-fiction writing as well as other forms of non-textual research. As the name suggests, this forum has been inherently thought of as a space for free, critical, and interactive exchanges. Majlis is one of those words which has many connotations in various Asian communities. Originally coming from Arabic, where it literally means ‘a sitting’, its usage has been numerous ranging from a ‘council’ to ‘certain religious gatherings’. Such potent possibilities exist because ‘majiis’ essentially signifies a dialogical and conversational space. Marking the space between formal and informal, the word is traditionally used for lounges and salons with free as well as planned discussions. For this reason, when Flavia Agnes (along with Madhushree Datta) came up with a legal resource centre for women, it was an apt name because it signifies the urgency of conversation on women’s legal rights in India. With the Research Majlis, CWS thus intends to create a broad and deep research lounge for emerging social and conceptual concerns by foregrounding the upcoming research that is pushing the boundaries of our understanding.

The Research Majlis will be a held during the last week of every month during the semester. We would also like to pair up each speaker with a discussant, in order to facilitate a deeper and more meaningful engagement with their work. Thus, we would also request our speakers to send a draft of the paper in advance. We invite our colleagues and peers to reach out to us with suggestions and proposals for presenting in the Research Majlis and we also look forward to your continuing participation as an audience in our discussions.

Fall 2021

Spring 2022