Varanasi, Uttar Pradesh, India
The past few decades have witnessed an unprecedented proliferation of theories that has led to the emergence of new approaches to the production and critique of knowledge. Theories as such, have emerged as unbounded group of writings about various interrelated knowledge systems -anthropology, psychology, linguistics, philosophy, social and intellectual history, gender studies and mass media studies. While some theories focus on textuality, some plead for the historicity or historicisation of the text, others see the text as a socio-cultural practice but they are not mutually exclusive, they often overlap each other. This interplay of textuality, history and culture in canonical and non-canonical texts, in past and present cultural representations, calls for explorations and interventions. While the established disciplines have incorporated many of these developments in their own objectives of study, the tensions within the fields have thrown up new dimensions that invariably demand interdisciplinary methods of inquiry. The proposed International Seminar on "Theory at Work: Text, History and Culture" intends to build up comprehensive and broad-based theoretical and critical approaches to race, gender, nation and culture. It also seeks to generate a discursive dialogue focusing on the deployment of theories in the study of various cultural representations - visual, written, aural and gestural.
For more details click here
