A Concept Note

National University of Educational Planning and Administration (NUEPA), New Delhi, India proposes to organize a Global Conclave of Young Scholars of Indian Education on January 27-29, 2011. The conclave aims at bringing together young researchers (doctoral, post-doctoral students and early-career faculty) working on Indian education from universities and research institutes in India and abroad. The conclave would provide these researchers a forum to share and to showcase their research, to network and to publish across boundaries of nations and disciplines.

Research on Indian education carried out in universities and research institutes in India and abroad is highly diverse in terms of disciplines, theoretical and ideological orientations, methodologies adopted and issues addressed. Indeed, a wide range of issues – from Jiddu Krishnamurthy’s philosophy, ethnographic studies of children in urban slums, econometric modeling of participation in schooling to politics of curricular content, privatization and external aid – are being examined by researchers studying Indian education. The sixth survey of educational research carried out by NCERT reports more than 2500 studies with the range of areas spreading from philosophy of education to health and sports between 1993 and 2000.

A number of universities have set up Asian, South Asian and even Indian centers to promote inter-disciplinary and comparative research on issues confronting India along with other South Asian/Asian countries. Several networks both of individual researchers and of institutions and centers working on these countries have been established to provide a platform for sharing of research and exchange of views. Prominent among these are International Institute of Asian Studies (IIAS) at Leiden and Amsterdam, Centre for South Asian Studies at Universities of Edinburgh, Sydney, Wisconsin-Madison and Toronto, German Institute of Global and Area Studies (GIGA) at Hamburg, Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (NIAS) at Copenhagen. There are several networks of scholars and institutes such as Swedish South Asian Studies Network (SASNET),.....More