British Academy: The UK's National Academy for the Humanities and Social Sciences
Politics and Society in Contemporary India:
Change and Diversity
Thursday 5 October 5 2006
The British Academy, 10 Carlton House Terrace, London SW1Y 5AH
Convenor
Professor Anthony Heath, FBA, Nuffield College, Oxford
The transformations in Indian society, economy and polity have gathered speed since the early 1990s, and are particularly manifest in the national and regional elections since 1997. This is an opportune moment to consider the growing body of data that attempts to make sense of these changes and to understand their likely significance as India becomes increasingly important as an economic and political force. The symposium will bring together leading specialists in the study of relationships between society and politics in contemporary India. The main approaches to be considered include those based on ethnographic fieldwork (mainly, but not only, by social anthropologists, sociologists and human geographers), the analysis of voting and election results (mainly by sociologists and political scientists) and the analysis of underlying structural constraints on political development (by demographers and sociologists).
Papers from this conference were published in 2010 in Diversity and Change in Modern India: Economic, Social and Political Approaches, edited by Anthony F Heath & Roger Jeffery (Proceedings of the British Academy, 159).
'A "Professor of Electoral Engineering": An election campaign in West Bengal' (PDF file - 715 KB), by Mukulika Banerjee, was published in British Academy Review, March 2010
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