Sarai-CSDS Independent Fellowships Workshop

August 26-28, 2004

The Independent Research fellowships are key to Sarai’s design of a distributed research network. Each year the fellowships support researchers working on the interface between popular culture, urban space and technological creativity. We see this as a foundation for a network of socially available, publicly accessible knowledge about key issues in contemporary cultural, intellectual and technological practice.

The Sarai Independent Research Fellowships completed its third year with this workshop in which thirty-eight projects were presented over the three days. The presentations were arranged in twelve panels according to the following themes: Transformations in Space and Time; Locating ‘Indian’ Cinema; Forming, Re-forming Locations; Designing Interventions; Ethnographic Spaces (1); Ethnographic Spaces (2); Plotting Urban Struggles; In Search of the Image; The Hidden History of Sound; Tracing Texts; Regulating the Laws of Regulation; and The Past, Present and Future of Work. The programme ended with a performance that came out of the project titled ‘Socialist Wives’, enacted in the Sarai Interface Zone on the evening of the last day.

The papers covered a fascinating range of material, and many were in creative audiovisual formats. In his opening statement, Shuddhabrata Sengupta, Fellow, Sarai, remarked that Sarai had always wanted to break new ground with regard to research; in particular, Sarai was keen to facilitate the opening of the field to the researcher as practitioner; support the mode where the practice itself and its methodologies became a form of research, where research was not restricted to the conventional definition of ‘findings’;and support the public rendering of such knowledge.