Project Team

India Principal Investigator

Dr. Ashok Kumar Mocherla, Assistant Professor, Indian Institute of Technology Indore, India

UK Principal Investigator​

Dr Sariya Cheruvallil-Contractor, Assistant Professor, Centre for Trust Peace and Social Relations, UK

Project Research Co-ordinator

Dr Alison Halford, Research Fellow, Faculty Research Centre for Data Science

Advisory Group

Dr Opinderjit Takhar

Director of the Centre for Sikh and Panjabi Studies, University of Wolverhampton

Professor Nishi Mitra

Professor in Women’s studies, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai, India

Professor Rowena Robinson

Sociology of religion, sociology of HE and minority studies

Dr Alun De Winter

Research Fellow, Centre for Global Learning, Education and Attainment, Coventry University

Aims

A multidisciplinary network of Indian and British academics will collaboratively investigate the impact of social inequalities around religion, ethnicity and gender on lived experiences of discrimination and equality on HE campuses in India. The network will contribute to improving HE access, experiences and outcomes for minority students and economic mobility of the communities these students come from.

1. INTELLECTUAL PARADIGMS: The network will uncover and unravel the impact of existing intellectual paradigms around religion, ethnicity and gender on knowledge production and minority student engagement on campus.

  • Re-imagine and visually chart (on the network website) the evolution of higher education in India through the lens of religion, ethnicity and gender by undertaking an in-depth literature review.
  • Core meeting 1 will focus on the discursive interrogation of the social and intellectual hierarchies that promote and nurture institutionalized expressions of discrimination and unfair treatment on the pretext of knowledge and knowledge production in HE contexts in India.
  • During Workshop 1 (WS1) the network will interrogate how existing intellectual paradigms and their associated activities use university spaces either to include or exclude minority students

2. LIVED EXPERIENCE: The network will examine how wider political discussions around nationalism, citizenship and international relations shape the identity of minority students marginalised on account of their religion, ethnicity or gender and their experiences of discrimination and equality

  • By surveying and documenting news reports of student activism, the network will map the complex underpinnings of student activism on campus laying particular emphasis on political culture of social spaces in HE to analyse intersectionality in students’ identity and (on campus and off campus) stimuli.
  • At workshop (WS2) the network will map locally-contextualized experiences of belief, explore inter-religious relations on campus and analyse the impact of students’ intersectional identities on their sense of belonging, or alienation, on campus
  • Interrogate the impact of HE as a tool for social and economic mobility of minority students and their communities

3. INCLUSIVE NARRATIVES: Consider the potential impact on students of inclusive narratives (including decolonized approaches, both conceptual and lived, of HE. A 2-day symposium and linked edited volume will

  • Critically interrogate differing understandings of ‘inclusive narratives of higher education’ and the changing socio-political contexts within which HE must function to produce both efficient employees and educated citizens
  • Interrogate the student voice through activism as an enabler or not of inclusive campus environments
  • Widen the geographical and theoretical scope of the project by including research narratives relating to campus experiences in other South Asian countries and to South Asian international and diaspora students studying in Western universities

4. SUSTAINABILITY: Grow the network over the course of two years into a multi-disciplinary, multi-nation virtual e-network of academics and practitioners interested in questions of discrimination, marginalization, inclusivity, opportunity to progress on campus based on minority religion and gender identity. This will facilitate inter-cultural learnings, exchanges and collaborations that extend beyond the funded lifetime of the network.

  • Lay the intellectual and methodological foundations for future research by undertaking a literature review of academic and non-academic approaches to the study of religion on Indian campuses, focusing on issues of gender, belonging and inter-religious relations.
  • Identify further avenues to raise the impact of future network activities

Project Impact Statement

When students who are at university to lay the foundations for their careers are prepared to forfeit or at least compromise their career prospects by going to prison over their demands for rights, we as leaders of academia need to pay attention. This research network, at its very heart, is conceptualised as a response to students’ activism for equality and rights. In doing so we address issues around sustained inequality and discrimination as experienced by minorities and women on Indian campuses. The existing political scenario in India is characterised by rapid economic and infrastructure development on the one hand, and on the other by the marginalisation of minority religious groups, ‘lower’ castes and women. Glaring social differences of inequality and discrimination is deeply disturbing in nature and but at the same time motivates people to strive hard to make a difference. In citizen-efforts aimed at making India more equal, the role of universities is paramount for they educate and train people who could be potential leaders of the country. Universities reflect the societies within which they are situated but arguably also have the potential to positively improve their contexts through the facilitation of social and economic development. But the questions remain;

  • Are universities achieving their potential to build cohesive educated societies?
  • Is education realizing its fundamental developmental objective being a powerful tool for social and economic upward mobility of students on the one hand and also sensitizing them towards most compelling social issues of our times i.e. poverty, inequality, discrimination, and human rights?
  • 70 years after the Indian constitution sought to build an equal Indian society (including though the use of positive discrimination) why do minorities and women continue to face unfair treatment and discrimination?

These are ‘big’ questions that cannot easily be resolved. They need sustained reflection, ethical practice and conscientious action. This research network provides the first step in for such a reflective, ethical and conscientious discourse. This research network will benefit research users both on and off campus by enabling topical but difficult discussions around the roles of universities, religious and gender marginalisation, problematic histories of knowledge production and inter-religious relations on campus. Good management and infrastructural support will facilitate establishing relationships and networks across diverse stakeholders. Our workshops and symposium will use a postcolonial and positional standpoint to bring users/stakeholders together to discuss our shared responses to the questions that this network and indeed minority students on campus are asking of university leadership.

The beneficiaries of this research will include: The HE sector Indian and in other South Asian countries; academics in the UK and India who are involved in the network events and publications will benefit from the intellectual exchanges and collaborations that this network facilitates; third sector organisations working in inter-faith relations will benefit from the discourses around dialogue, understanding and respect for the different other and the international academic community that is involved in the study of religion, ethnicity and gender on campus will benefit from the theoretical and methodological narratives that emerge from the network.