Name: Rajni Palriwala

Institution: Department of Sociology, University of Delhi

Brief Self Introduction

Major (academic field), main academic works and related activities,
current academic interest and expectations/plans for the GCOE program:

Professor of Sociology at the University of Delhi. I have been teaching and researching on various themes within the broad area of gender, including care, citizenship, and the state; kinship and marriage; widowhood; dowry; women’s movements; women and work; migration; and also on fieldwork methodology. Cross-cultural comparison is a constant interest. The GCOE themes are of direct interest to research I am currently engaged with on the social and political economy of care in India. This is part of an eight country project, including Korea and Japan as the other Asian countries, focussing on the distribution of care between household, community, market and the state and examining state policies, gendered norms and practices, and the social recognition and value of care. I am also finalizing a joint publication on the adverse juvenile sex ratio in India, which is available as a report. This study was based on intensive and extensive research that drew together the themes of marriage, economic processes and gendered patterns of work, state policy, family building strategies, and the social value of sons and daughters, men and women. These study are in continuity with earlier work on The Netherlands and I am very keen to undertake a systematic cross-cultural comparison. The research on The Netherlands was a collaborative research project on the renegotiations of the private (including intimacy and social networks) and the public (welfare state, public debate) in the Netherlands through a focus on gender, care, and citizenship (see below). I also have a long interest in the sociology of emotion and here draw on the above research as well as earlier research on Rajasthan.

To further develop these themes, young and more experienced researchers from a variety of disciplines and cultural/national locations need to be able to exchange their findings and discuss their ideas. I and two other colleagues attempted this in an international seminar on current trends in marriage in South Asia, which was held in September of this year. The GCOE programme should enable this exchange and collaboration; in particular, the possibility for doctoral students and young researchers to meet their peers and faculty from other institutions and countries will be of great significance in furthering grounded, comparative analyses. I see this as a valuable input to my own research as well as the larger project of building interest and expertise on the theme of renegotiations of the private and public.

Main Publications

1. Co-ed. 2008. Marriage, Migration, and Gender. (with Patricia Uberoi). New Delhi: Sage.
2. 2005. Care, culture and citizenship: Revisiting the politics of welfare in the Netherlands (with Carla Risseeuw and Kamala Ganesh). Amsterdam: Spinhuis.
3. 2002, “Rhetorics of Motherhood: Politics, Policy, and Family Ideologies in India”, In K.Sharma, L.Sarkar and L.Kasturi (eds.) Between Tradition, Counter-Tradition and Heresy. Delhi: Rainbow Publications.
4. (with Indu Agnihotri), 2001, “Tradition, the Family and the State: Politics of the Women’s Movement in the Eighties”, in Gender and Nation. Delhi: Nehru Museum and Library.
5. 1996, Rajni Palriwala and Carla Risseeuw (eds.), Shifting Circles of Support: Contextualising kinship and gender relations in South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa. Delhi: Sage Publications.
6. 1994, Changing kinship, family, and gender relations in South Asia: Processes, trends and issues. Leiden: Women and Autonomy Centre, University of Leiden.

Introduction of Overseas Partners’ Institution

The University of Delhi, established in 1922, had a modest beginning with just three colleges, two faculties (Arts and Science) and about 750 students. At present, there are 14 faculties, 86 academic departments and 79 colleges spread all over the city, with about 2,20,000 students. In addition there are over 100,000 distance education students registered with the Campus of Open Learning. The university has 15 libraries. These are in addition to the libraries in the colleges.

The Department of Sociology was established as a constituent unit of the Delhi School of Economics and the Faculty of Social Sciences in 1959. When the University Grants Commission first established 18 Centres of Advanced Studies across the country in 1968, the department was one of them. It admits students from all over the country as well as from other countries to post-graduate and research courses. The fieldwork tradition and a comparative perspective, assiduously cultivated by the founder of the department, Prof. M.N. Srinivas, remain integral to the department’s practice.

The research conducted in the department covers a variety of fields, including some developed for the first time in the country. Currently, major thrust areas include the sociology of gender and state and society. Pioneering studies have been published in these areas and in the fields of family and kinship, stratification and social exclusion, the sociology of masculinity, social and religious movements, textual and contextual studies of Hinduism, religious symbolism, education, community power structures, local-level politics, elections, trade unions, co-operatives, the sociology of development, historical sociology, environmental sociology and political ecology, urban and rural sociologiesy, medical sociology, demography, and migration. Visual anthropology, popular culture, citizenship, the sociology of violence, and disciplinary histories are among the areas being developed. Research students and members of the faculty are encouraged to present their research to the Sociological Research Colloquium (SRC), which meets on Friday afternoons during the academic session.

These research interests have been consolidated through the department’s teaching programmes: M.A., M. Phil, and Ph.D. Many of the courses including Sociology of India, Kinship, Political Sociology, Economic Sociology, Sociology of Development, and Gender and Society directly focus on issues pertaining to the GCOE programme theme. The mode of instruction in the M.A. includes lectures, intensive tutorials, and student presentations, while the M.Phil. consists of seminar courses and a dissertation. The medium of instruction and examination is English.

Department web-site: http://sociology.du.ac.in/
Personal page: http://people.du.ac.in/~rpalriwala/ (not updated since February 2008!)
 

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