PhD Course

Asian Diversity in a Global Context

How can we capture specificities with our approaches and methods?

PhD Workshop, 14-15 November

Goals of the course

  • To create a cross-disciplinary forum that challenges PhD students to test and discuss issues of common concern relating to the theme of the conference: "Asian Diversity in a Global Context"

  • To address individual theoretical, methodological, empirical and ethical challenges by "mentoring" and "peer reviewing" the papers presented by the participants.

The intensive PhD workshop is based on some assumptions about you as a potential participant. As a PhD student, you:

  • Are working on a project in Asia within the social sciences or the humanities

  • Are eager to present you work at a highly profiled conference with peer reviewed conference papers

  • Have access to disciplinary research training, but rarely to cross-disciplinary training relating to your geographical area of study

  • Are interested in discussing your challenges, your project and your paper with other Asia specialists, and not only your normal disciplinary interlocutors

  • Are interested to learn more about the work of fellow PhD students working with the same region or country

This intensive PhD workshop is packaged with a conference that will examine Asian diversity in a global context. As a PhD student you are invited to submit abstracts for a conference paper in the conference and/or a paper at the PhD workshop. Your conference paper must relate to one of the themes of the conference panels and workshops.

The conference and the PhD workshop are integrated and participation in both activities will not only expose the participants to a wide variety of international expertise from the humanities and social sciences but also provide an opportunity to interact with both senior and junior scholars as well as other PhD students.

This workshop is organized by a group of researchers at the University of Copenhagen who have participated in the development of the university's Asian Dynamics Initiative and in organizing the Conference: ‘Asian Diversity in a Global Context'. Together with specially invited mentors, we offer you an opportunity of a two days intensive discussion of your conference and/or research papers. We also offer advice on how to work with Asian resources and how to publish.

The course is open to PhD students at any stage of the PhD project.

Faculty

The members of the workshop faculty are three special invited international mentors and three mentors from the University of Copenhagen.

  • Paul Bailey, Professor, University of Edinburgh 
  • Nandini Sundar, Professor, Delhi University /Yale 
  • Anne Bayard-Sakai, Director, Centre d'Etudes Japonaises, INALCO, Paris
  • Ravinder Kaur, Associate Professor, South Asian Studies, University of Copenhagen
  • Jørgen Delman, Professor, China Studies, University of Copenhagen

Read more about the conference here

Workshop outline

The workshop will be organized as follows:

  • Short case studies on specific challenges by the Faculty member
  • Review of paper by fellow PhD student
  • Review of paper by Faculty member
  • Open discussion
  • Anja Møller Rasmussen, Chief Librarian, will speak on NIAS LINC: Asia resources - special issues
  • Gerald Jackson, Editor-in-Chief, NIAS Press: How to get published
  • Final discussion to capture the main trends in the discussions during the course.

Programme can be found here.

Partners

  • NIAS - Nordic Institute of Asian Studies
  • The Research School of Regional Studies
  • The Danish Research School of Anthropology and Ethnography
  • EastAsiaNet
  • Asian Dynamics Initiative  

Literature

Heimer, M. & S. Thogersen (Eds), 2006. Doing Fieldwork in China. Copenhagen: NIAS Press

Jackson, G. & M. Lenstrup, 2009. Getting Published: A Companion For The Humanities And Social Sciences. Copenhagen: NIAS Press

Articles

Kaur, Ravinder: Narrative absence - An ‘Untouchable' account of Partition migration in Contributions to Indian Sociology 2008, 42, pp. 281

Kaur, Ravinder: Distinctive Citizenship: Refugees, Subjects and Post-colonial State in India's Partition in Cultural and Social History, Volume 6, Number 4, December 2009 , pp. 429-446 (18)

Sundar, Nandini: Caste as Census Category: Implications for Sociology in Current Sociology, 2000, 48, pp. 11