New research programme on India

Dr. Ravinder Kaur at the Dept. for Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies, University of Copenhagen, was awarded DKK 3.9 million for a collective research programme entitled "Nation in Motion: Globalization, Development and Governance in 'New' India", from the Danish Council for Social Science Research. The programme will run from 2010-2014.

The interdisciplinary research programme concerns the nature, effects and fragilities of India's imminent global ‘rise'. Through three integrated studies on recent development interventions and new governing practices, the researchers explore different processes of globalization that are shaping ‘new' India within and how India itself is being projected outside as a global power. The programme will generate fresh empirical data from two locations in urban Delhi and rural West Bengal in order to map out the historical and contemporary patterns of inequality emerging in the making of global India, and the ways in which they are leveled, projected and even subverted on a global scale. Theoretically the project aims to break fresh ground in the interface of globalization and nation-state by showing how the ‘global' nation is manufactured in specific locations, and how a new species of relations conjugate the nation and the state in a global context.