Speaker: PROF. MICHAEL SZONYI
Frank Wen-hsiung Wu Memorial Professor of Chinese History and Director, Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, Harvard University
Moderator: PROF. TARUN KHANNA
Jorge Paulo Lemann Professor, Harvard Business School and Director, The Lakshmi Mittal and Family South Asia Institute, Harvard University
How should societies identify and promote merit? Enabling all people to fulfill their full potential and ensuring that competent and capable leaders are selected to govern are central challenges for any society. Failure to meet these challenges can have enormous costs, for individuals and for societies as a whole. The richness of China’s historical experience and its distinctive current practices offer useful tools for reflection and comparative analysis. Does the case of China offer any lessons – positive or negative – for India to consider?
START
Tue, Nov 27, 2018 at 06:00pm
END
Tue, Nov 27, 2018 at 08:30pm
AJAY SINHA, Professor of Art History, Mount Holyoke College
Chair: JINAH KIM, Gardner Cowles Associate Professor of History of Art & Architecture and Faculty Director, Arts @ Mittal Institute
In the Spring of 1938, an Indian dancer, Ram Gopal, posed in a variety of fantastical costumes for the American photographer, Carl Van Vechten, in New York City. Studying over 100 large-size photographs resulting from the photoshoot, the lecture builds an illustrated story of their mutual fascination and exchange, triggered by the camera. The remarkable images, now part of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscripts Library, Yale University, show traces of the myriad, transcultural relations being performed during the photoshoot. They reveal an interplay of differing investments in the image when we ask: What does the Indian dancer show the camera; what does the American photographer see through his lens? Their visual exploration helps us elaborate on an underrepresented history of exchanges between the cultural worlds of India and the U.S. in early-20th century.
START
Fri, Nov 16, 2018 at 04:30pm
END
Fri, Nov 16, 2018 at 06:00pm
Join Vijayendra Rao in a seminar discussing his paper “Deliberative Inequality: A Text-As-Data Analysis of Indian Village Assemblies” (Co-authored with R. Parthasarathy and N. Palaniswamy).
Vijayendra (Biju) Rao, a Lead Economist in the Research Department of the World Bank, integrates his training in economics with theories and methods from anthropology, sociology and political science to study the social, cultural, and political context of extreme poverty in developing countries.
He leads the Social Observatory, an inter-disciplinary effort to improve the conversation between citizens and governments. It does this – first – by improving the quality of civic action by strengthening forums for deliberation and developing tools to facilitate collective action, and – second – by building the “adaptive capacity” of large-scale anti-poverty projects; i.e. the ability of projects to make everyday decisions, and modify project design, on the basis of high-quality descriptive, evaluative and process-oriented information.
His research has spanned a wide variety of subjects including participatory development, deliberative democracy, the rise in dowries in India, the determinants and consequences of domestic violence, the economics of sex work, public celebrations, and culture and development policy.
The paper he will be discussing during this seminar can be accessed here.
START
Fri, Nov 2, 2018 at 02:00pm
END
Fri, Nov 2, 2018 at 04:00pm
A panel discussion on capturing identity, everyday life and activism in South Asia through the digital lens.
PANELISTS
AMAN KALEEM and SAMSUL ALAM HELAM
Mittal Institute 2018-19 Visiting Artist Fellows
Chair: Jinah Kim, Gardner Cowles Associate Professor of History of Art and Architecture
START
Tue, Oct 30, 2018 at 05:30pm
END
Tue, Oct 30, 2018 at 07:00pm
Sreenivasan Jain, Managing Editor of one of India’s major TV news networks, NDTV, will discuss the immense demands and challenges of effectively covering such a large country. The growth of digital media and TV news and the ongoing strength of newspapers demonstrate the appetite for news in India but, as in all countries with a free press, there are debates over quality, editorial independence, ownership and diversity. Hasit Shah, former Senior Producer, BBC News and 2014 Nieman-Berkman Fellow, Harvard University, will moderate the conversation.
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Fri, Oct 12, 2018 at 03:00pm
END
Fri, Oct 12, 2018 at 04:30pm
In the final weeks before the massive 2017 Rohingya exodus from Myanmar, reports indicate that the vast majority of Rohingya settlements suffered violence, often extreme, at the hands of Myanmar security forces and civilians. As part of a large-scale and unique research effort to determine the scope, scale, and patterns of these attacks, Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) surveyed leaders from 604 Rohingya hamlets in Myanmar’s Rakhine state encompassing more than 916,000 people. The findings, coupled with in-depth interviews and forensic medical examinations of Rohingya survivors, point to a widespread and systematic pattern of targeted violence – including rapes and killings of women, men, and children – that drove more than 720,000 Rohingya into neighboring Bangladesh. Dr. Parveen Parmar and Dr. Jen Leigh will present the findings of these studies.
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Wed, Oct 3, 2018 at 4:30
END
Wed, Oct 3, 2018 at 6:00
Join us for our ongoing India Seminar Series to discuss the growing challenge of Water Fluorosis, in a discussion titled, ‘Tackling Fluorosis: Innovative technology as a solution to the spreading health crisis’
There are about 66 million people in India suffering from toxic levels of fluoride in their drinking water, these are mostly poor people in rural communities in dry / arid area that must depend of groundwater as their drinking water source. Fluoride is a vicious toxic ion in the sense that it affects and attacks the poor far more aggressively that it affects those nutritionally better off. It also is very effective in ruining the lives of very young people who then suffer from serious bone deformation (skeletal fluorosis) and its harmful economic, social, and psychological effects.
The panelists for this discussion include,
– Dr. Andrew Z. Haddad- ITRI-Rosenfeld Postdoctoral Fellow, Lawrence Berkeley National Lab
– Srikrishna Sridhar Murthy- Founder and CEO, Sattva Consulting
– Dr. Sunderrajan Krishnan- Executive Director, INREM Foundation
To RSVP write to mittalinsitutedelhi@fas.harvard.edu and confirm your presence at the event.
START
Thu, Sep 27, 2018 at 06:00pm
END
Thu, Sep 27, 2018 at 08:00pm
Join Jacqueline Bhabha and Elizabeth Donger for a discussion about prevention science in child protection, with a focus on India. This seminar, with support from the Harvard University Asia Center, will explore the early findings of a research project that examines community-level strategies to prevent violence, abuse, and exploitation of children in India. The project involves three separate evaluations of harm prevention programs run by innovative Indian nonprofits in Uttar Pradesh, West Bengal and Telangana. The study is intended as a corrective to the dominant focus on remedies targeting already-occurred violations of children’s fundamental rights. It will enable further research in this field and will guide policy development, shifting child protection inputs and outcomes from after harm is done to before harm occurs.
Jacqueline Bhabha is a professor of the practice of health and human rights at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and the Director of Research at the Harvard FXB Center for Health and Human Rights. Elizabeth Donger is a Research Associate at the Harvard FXB Center.
This event is co-sponsored by the FXB Center for Human Rights.
START
Wed, Sep 19, 2018 at 04:30pm
END
Wed, Sep 19, 2018 at 06:00pm
COST: Free
