Collaborations
DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY
Biotrash: Medical Garbage in Chennai, India, 1980 – 2010
Dr. Sarah Hodges (Warwick) – Centre for the History of Medicine
The Nuffield Foundation, the Leverhulme Trust, and the Wellcome Trust (2009 – 2014)
Brief details and intended outcomes:
The project is a contemporary history of medical garbage in Chennai. On the one hand, the history of medical garbage (‘biotrash’) is a history of the lives and livelihoods that cluster around the illegal recovery of discarded medical items. On the other hand, the history of biotrash is a history of the laws, institutions and bureaucrats who together have comprised the repeated official, failed attempts to eradicate this informal economy from the city’s landscape. By ‘medical garbage,’ I refer to manufactured objects routinely used and discarded in clinical encounters (e.g., used disposable syringes, medical tubing, blood bags, pharmaceuticals and pharmaceutical containers). This project examines medical garbage during a recent—and largely celebrated—chapter of Indian history which has seen significant economic growth alongside new policies of market liberalisation. By investigating the corollary histories of and contact zones that connect the informal market for biotrash and the official policies that address it, this project illuminates the sinews that connect India’s recent success to its constitutive underside.
Further details here
Science, Technology, and Medicine in India, 1930 – 2000: The problem of poverty
Dr. Sarah Hodges (Warwick) and Professor Mohan Rao (Jawaharlal Nehru University) – Centre for the History of Medicine
Supported by British Academy International Partnership Award (South Asia), 2010 – 2013
Brief details and intended outcomes:
This three-year programme, held jointly by Warwick and Jawaharlal Nehru University, consists of research, workshops and teaching. It connects established faculty, post-doctoral scholars and postgraduates in India and the UK to examine how far and how effectively projects of science, technology and medicine have addressed questions of poverty in India or instead contributed to their intensification (or concealment) between 1930 and 2000. Poverty was the predominant economic/political/social paradigm within which late colonial, nationalist and post-independence era policy was constructed. This project assesses what happened to articulate or supplant this optic by the close of the twentieth century. It explores the significance, for the earlier paradigm of poverty eradication, of India’s recent economic successes for the research, policy, and practice of science, technology and medicine in India. Has the problem of poverty in India been solved, or has the study of poverty become inconvenient alongside the rise of new narratives that frame India as a site of inspirational economic growth?
Further details here
The Khanna Study: Population and Development in India, 1953 – 1969
Rebecca Williams (Warwick) - Centre for the study of History and Medicine
Brief details and intended outcomes:
In the second half of the twentieth century, ‘overpopulation’ became the source of anxiety for a number of government and non-government organisations across the globe, and family planning programmes were devised to solve the problem of population growth by lowering the birth rate. Whilst concern surrounded population growth across the developing world, India occupied an exceptional position within overpopulation discourse. My PhD examines population control in postcolonial India through a case study of the Khanna Study, a population control experiment conducted in the Ludhiana district of Punjab between 1953 and 1969 by the Harvard School of Public Health in collaboration with the Ludhiana Christian Medical College; Rockefeller Foundation; and the Government of India. Whilst the Khanna Study has already been the subject of much debate amongst demographers and anthropologists, my project draws upon archival material across India and the US to re-analyse the Khanna Study in the context of postwar, post-independence debates about population growth and family planning. Through an in-depth case study of the Khanna Study, my project asks: Why was India so important to global discourses of ‘overpopulation,’ and related population control interventions? Why was population control so crucial to national projects of development and modernisation in the newly independent Indian nation? And what was the role of such studies in laying the intellectual/scientific foundations for systematic population control interventions?
Further details here
WARWICK MANUFACTURING GROUP
WMG in India
Professor Sujit Banerji (Executive Director of Postgraduate Programmes) and Professor Richard Dashwood (Academic Director)
Brief details and intended outcomes:
A series of collaborative programmes, research projects, and degrees with Indian companies and universities.
Brief details and intended outcomes: ‘WMG’s international reputation stems from our pioneering approach to research in an intensely competitive worldwide marketplace. It is this research that underpins our education programmes, transferring our valuable knowledge and expertise to students at all stages of their careers. Over the past 30 years we have created a strong, long-standing relationship with India through partnerships with leading manufacturers and universities.’
Further details here
CENTRE FOR APPLIED LINGUISTICS
ELT Research Survey of India (2013 – 2016)
Dr. Richard Smith (Warwick – Centre for Applied Linguistics), Professor Paul Bunashekar (English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad), Professor Rama Mathew (Delhi University – Central Institute of Education)
The British Council India
Brief details and intended outcomes:
Funded by the British Council India, this project involves a collaboration between the Centre for Applied Linguistics, University of Warwick (Richard Smith), the English and Foreign Langauges University, Hyderabad (Professor Paul Bunashekar and others) and the Central Institute of Education, Delhi University (Professor Rama Mathew). The aim is to map ELT research in India from 2005 to 2014, with a view to assessment of strengths and weaknesses and encouragement of capacity-building in this area.
Further details here
Teachers researching with children in large classes in India (2013 – 2014)
Dr. Richard Smith (Warwick – Centre for Applied Linguistics), Dr. Annamaria Pinter (Warwick – Centre for Applied Linguistics), Dr. Rama Mathew (Delhi University – Faculty of Education)
Warwick International Partnerships Award; also supported by the British Council India and OUP India
Brief details and intended outcomes:
Funded by a Warwick International Partnerships Award with the support also of The British Council India and OUP India, this project involves a collaboration between Richard Smith and Annamaria Pinter of CAL with Professor Rama Mathew, Dean of the Faculty of Education, University of Delhi. A group of primary teachers in Delhi are being supported in teacher-research with children as co-researchers, with a view to exploring feasibility for roll-out on a wider scale from 2014 onwards.
Further details here
THEATRE AND PERFORMANCE STUDIES
Research collaboration between School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi and School of Theatre, Performance, and Cultural Policy Studies, University of Warwick
At the institutional level, University of Warwick and Jawaharal Nehru University signed an agreement to treat each other as ‘preferred partners’ and to collaborate on joint research ventures across the faculties in 2008. Theatre and Performance Studies and the School of Arts and Aesthetics were highlighted in the agreement as good prospects for partnership. In March 2009, Jim Davis and Janelle Reinelt travelled to Delhi at the invitation of Bishnupriya Dutt to begin discussions about an on-going partnership and programme between the two schools. In 2013 at meetings in Delhi, the two Schools decided to take up the topic, 'What's Left of the Left?' in order to excavate the history of left-wing political movements and their relations to theatre and performance, with a comparative focus on India, the UK, the US, and the former Yugoslavia. Plans include future colloquiums and publications after an intense period of reading and research. In the meantime, a number of grant applications are pending. The collaboration is robust and ongoing, and the two Schools continue to be committed to joint scholarship.
Variety of supporting institutions and organizations: IAS Visiting Fellowship, UKIERI grant, etc.
Further details here
WARWICK INSTITUTE FOR EMPLOYMENT RESEARCH
The impact of higher education expansion on economic restructuring, occupational change and access to opportunities in Brazil and India
Professor Kate Purcell (project director – Warwick Institute for Employment Research), Professor Nadya Guimarães (Sao Paulo University), Professor Alvaro Comin (Sao Paolo University), Professor Rakesh Basant (Observer Research Foundation New Delhi), Professor Jeemol Unni (the Institute of Rural Management in Anand, Gujarat)
Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC)
Brief details and intended outcomes:
Both Brazil and India have experienced rapid growth and are predicted to become leading world economies by 2050. In many ways, they are experiencing the same challenges experienced by the UK in the second part of the 20th century. Similarly, both have higher education sectors that have grown and diversified considerably in the last 30 years which are seen as key to their development of skills and knowledge to promote innovation, growth and global competitiveness. However, as in developed countries, development has mainly benefited those with existing educational and social advantages, despite initiatives to extend equality of opportunity and improve educational access to disadvantaged groups. This is an international project funded by the UK’s Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC). It builds directly on the preliminary phase of the Pathfinder project in Brazil and India, involving an interdisciplinary team of partners who participated in the preparatory workshops, extending existing bilateral collaborative research experience between members of the UK and Brazilian teams, the UK and Indian teams and the Brazilian and Indian teams. The project is led by Professor Kate Purcell, who is the project director, Professor Nadya Guimarães and Professor Alvaro Comin at the Sao Paulo University, Professor Rakesh Basant at the Observer Research Foundation in New Delhi, and Professor Jeemol Unni at the Institute of Rural Management in Anand, Gujarat. It involves collaborative analyses and knowledge transfer among the partner teams to improve the use of and development of statistical resources nationally and internationally. The findings are being published in English and Portuguese and will be of interest to policy and academic stakeholders in the two overseas countries involved. The research and methodologies developed will be of relevance to and possible replication in other emerging economies and perhaps more widely. International publication and further development is planned by the co-applicants. Working papers can be downloaded on the right-hand side and a book in Portuguese, further working papers and other publications are in production.
Further details here
HEALTH SCIENCES - POPULATIONS, EVIDENCE AND TECHNOLOGIES
Grey Literature Review: Health Promotion Interventions to Reduce Diabetes Risk in South Asians
Professor Ala Szczepura (Warwick – Health Services Research)
CLAHRC (Collaboration for Leadership in Applied Health Research and Care) Nottinghamshire
Further details here
POLITICS AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES (PAIS)
Gendered Ceremony and Ritual in Parliament: the UK, South Africa and India
The Gendered Ceremony and Ritual in Parliament Programme, funded by the Leverhulme Trust, examines how struggles over the meanings and performance of ceremony and ritual in parliament secure and reproduce as well as challenge and transform institutional norms. Its insights into the theory and practice or representation are intended to inform democratic practice and invigorate political participation.
Professor Shirin Rai (Warwick – Professor of PAIS)
The Leverhulme Trust