Power, Inequality, and Hierarchy in India.
Aarti Sethi, Professor
Anthropology
Applications for Fall 2024 are closed for this project.
India is the most unequal country in the world. It is also the most populous country in the world with a population of 1.43 billion people. Currently, 75% of national wealth is owned by only 10% of the population, and 40% of national wealth by only 1% of the population. To put these statistics in perspective, it means that over 1/8th of the world’s population live in a society in which staggering levels of wealth and income inequality structure every aspect of their daily life.
Income inequality of this enormous scale translates into educational inequality, environmental and thermal inequality, the inequality of access to education, health inequalities, unequal access to food, housing, shelter, water, transport. Almost every dimension of the daily life of most Indians is structured by this foundational socio-economic fact. And yet there is no public conversation about inequality in India. This is not surprising as it is in the interests of social and economic elites to prevent these conversations from happening. If Indians began talking about inequality in a sustained way, perhaps the vast mass of people might begin demanding a more equal society. It might even lead to revolution. And elites do not like revolutions.
This is where this project comes in. This project will begin to research and gather materials on inequality in India across a wide range of topics that impact the life of India’s people——health, housing, the environment, food, education, and so on.
The eventual aim is three-fold: first, to create a comprehensive open-source syllabus and teaching resource on inequality that can be used by educators. Second, to create a website where these materials will be hosted. And third, to create educational videos in which I will create lectures in Hindi on these topics for online dissemination. Since these videos are meant for a broad public, they cannot be a traditional classroom lecture.
This is a 2 year (4 semester) project. The first year (Fall 2024 and Spring 2025) will focus on research, building a corpus of materials, and creating the syllabus. The second year (Fall 2025 and Spring 2026) will involve making the website and the videos. You do not have to sign on for two years. For the first phase, it will require that you are able to commit to 2 semesters (Fall 2024 and Spring 2025) for the sake of continuity.
Role: Selected apprentices will research a given topic in a broad and expansive way. The research will include both traditional academic materials, such as articles, books, and journals. As well as podcasts, art, music, archival documents, news reports, films, and other such materials.
Qualifications: A) Students should be comfortable and willing to explore both traditional academic materials such as books and articles, as well as other materials such as films, archival documents, tik tok videos, memes, etc.
B) Familiarity with India/South Asia is preferred though not required. I will prioritize students who have familiarity with India, as it is (like all societies) extremely complex and dense, and prior familiarity will mean that you can hit the ground running without having to first do a lot of background prep. If you do not have any familiarity with India, but would like to learn, I will still look at your application. It will be a steep learning curve though, so you should keep that in mind when applying.
C) Students will need to be highly motivated, self directed, show initiative, and be organized.
D) Students should be willing to try out different web-based options for organizing the materials gathered and generated through the project.
E) Students majoring in any discipline in the social sciences---anthropology, sociology, economics, political science, history, ethnic studies, women and gender studies---will be given preference. If you are majoring in urban planning, you are encouraged to apply. If you are a double major please do apply. If you are not majoring in a social science discipline at all, I will still consider your application, though it will take you some time to adjust to social science methodologies.
Hours: 3-5 hrs
Social Sciences