76 – Discourses, Narratives, Stories and Contestations from the Margins

Politico-social and economic life is often seen to be determined by structures and institutions that determine behaviour patterns and consequently outcomes. Scholarly analysis is thus focussed on how the various actors – superordinate or subordinate – are located in the distribution of power and wealth and what processes and mechanisms are deployed to interrogate such locations. However, both domination and its contestation are located in the world of ideas and memories whose narrativization first invents a cognitive autonomy that may be mobilised for purposes of contestation. Similarly, domination is also a product of a master narrative that seeks to supress, subsume, deny or forget alternative stories and articulations. Mechanisms and tools of such ideational domination and constatation are varied: storytelling, symbolic and physical memorialisation, printed material, folklore, sociocultural traditions, literature and drama, and so, extending up to new and ontological epistemological challenges by the dominant. Finally, these processes are deeply implicated in construction of worldviews and framing questions of social justice, identity and give meaning to almost all politico-social phenomenon.

Convenors

Prof. Peter B Andersen
- Prof. Sanjukta Das Gupta
- Prof. Amit Prakash -