Lecture Series
Intersections is a multidisciplinary platform for open discussion and examination of the liberal arts and their pedagogies, methodologies, and trajectories in our times. We aim to re-centre the reflective, thinking spirit in contemporary social and scholarly life. Our engagement with critical thinkers and writers from across the disciplinary spectrum is informed by a foundational desire to understand the generation and sustenance of social meaning and processes which constitute our shared lived experience. Join us in unearthing and understanding truth as it gets created at the intersections of the personal, the public, and the political.
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In keeping with the vision of the G20 University Connect programme of the Ministry of Education, Government of India, IIT Bhilai organised an outreach programme to celebrate India’s yearlong presidency of the G20. The outreach programme consisted of a recurring exhibition and a lecture series, aiming to raise awareness amongst the IIT Bhilai community of students, staff, and faculty on issues of critical global importance being addressed by the G20, including LiFE mission, sustainable development, international financial stability, cybersecurity, and more. The Department of Liberal Arts at IIT Bhilai acted as the nodal centre for this outreach programme.
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Conferences
International Conference: Experiencing Home : Domestic Architecture in Urban Writing
The tangled trajectories of industrialisation, nationalism, and colonialism brought a pronounced emphasis on the home as the fulcrum of social existence over the course of the long nineteenth century, even as they birthed a dynamic new sense of the everyday which is both generated by and generative of the bourgeois world order. In all of this, home has held a place of significance as the stage on which domesticity and urbanity have sought to shape each other within broader zones of influence. This conference is interested in dwelling on questions which emerge from the dialectic seepage of the affective, spatial, and material with reference to the evolution of domestic architecture and the experience of home in urban writing.
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International Conference: Narrating the South Asian City: Critical Perspectives
A multi-pronged interreferencing has been insistently reshaping South Asian cities, informed as much by their shared history of colonisation as by their similar encounters with socio-economic liberalisation and bellicose, entrepreneurial nationalism. This evolving experience of urbanity has altered not just what we say and write about our cities but also how we do so. This conference aims to assess urban writing across genres and forms as it engages with and deliberates on urbanity in this region. It puts together scholarship which is able to complement its deployment of the literary with historical, sociological, architectural, and geographical perspectives.
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National Conference: Freedom at Midnight : Women’s voices and the Indian freedom struggle
As India observes 75 years of its independence from British imperial rule in 2022, it is fitting to revisit the legacy of our freedom struggle and re-examine the contributions and sacrifices made by persons from all walks of life towards our independence. Needless to say, women were an important part of this multifaceted conceptualisation of freedom throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and imagined freedom in not just political, economic, and jurisdictional but also social and cultural terms in a deeply gendered manner. This conference intends to bring together scholarship on women’s contributions to the Indian freedom struggle and their self-fashioning in their own works and voices.
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Workshops
South Asian Water Imaginaries in an Era of Environmental Crisis
Literary texts from South Asia have of late begun to display an acute awareness of this environmental crisis and the manifold cultural and economic impact it is having on the region. Such texts may be considered as gateways to vicariously access the environmental challenges that South Asia is exposed to. Taking cue from these texts, this workshop aims to trace the presence of water in South Asian literature as an indispensable environmental actant continuously shaping its possibilities and perils. The workshop is being conceived as an outcome oriented platform which will seek to collaboratively reflect upon a set of chosen thematics as emergent from and reflected in literary texts.
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Researchers’ Colloquium
The Department Seminar Committee hosts Researchers' Colloquiums once a semester to provide our doctoral scholars with an interactive forum to present their ongoing research projects to faculty and peers alike. Participation in these colloquiums is voluntary, and they are led by the scholars themselves. The colloquiums are opportunities for scholars to hone their research communication skills and equip themselves to interact more visibly and cogently with society at large.
Please click here for the Book of Abstracts for 2022-23-M.
Please click here for the Book of Abstracts for 2022-23-W.
Please click here for the Book of Abstracts for 2023-24-M.