Paper short abstract:

The Art of Belonging: rituals as institutionalised structures of advocacy, rites of passage, and conduits of belonging. What might rituals teach us about the enduring nature of collective memory? And, how might rituals invite us to connect to ourselves and others in enduring, perennial ways.

Paper long abstract:

This DPhil research is interested in ‘institutionalised structures of advocacy’ that champion various forms of diversity. It explores how rituals and rites of passage play a role in helping people cultivate a sense of belonging in elite, higher education institutions marked by their power, politics, and prestige. As a DPhil student at Oxford, researching Oxford, I am doing ethnography at home. Naturally, this invites a range of complexities and considerations. During this talk, I share some preliminary notes, observations, and insights from the field interwoven with several autoethnographic data. Overall, I am interested in how institutional rites and rituals might have the potential to endorse, validate, and perhaps even advocate for various kinds of heterogeneity.

Paper short abstract:

This paper attempts to problematize the university as a shared space that has historically been producing uncommon chronicle of gender, and of other categorical inequalities, in India. How notions of popular culture with respect to gender institutionalized is discussed to dismantle the inequality.

Paper long abstract:

Common Space and Uncommon Chronicles; Exploring the Accounts Of Gender On Indian University Campus

Abstract

This paper proposed to examine how gender plays a key role in shaping the experiences of women

students on the university campus and stresses its’ social dynamics as a shared space. University has

been potential in shattering the glass-ceilings based on gender that actively challenged the patriarchal

notions and praxis. Hence, women became vocal and asserted their rights and identity that has been

silenced for ages globally. Theoretically, feminist studies have discussed the nature of androcentric

educational spaces and post-modern feminist theory incorporated the intersectional experiences of

women based on race, class, caste, religion, region, and so forth. However, the encounters of Indian

women students in South Asia need to be traversed deeper as the university space has its own codes of

conduct and expected gender conformity owing to their socio-cultural context. This presents the

whole dialogue of gender through a different lens. Therefore, probing questions such as how inclusive

are the inclusive universities as shown in the front line? How gender is being framed with the

different mechanisms of the university set up is significant. Grounded on these questions the study

presents an in-depth overview of the women students in Indian universities from the feminist’

perspective. Much of its analytical concepts and theoretical frameworks have been developed based

on empirical/ethnographic data collected from women students of a Central University located in

South India.

Keywords: University Education, Gender, Codes of Conduct, Feminism, Indian Women Students.

Paper short abstract:

Aligning with sociological frameworks of emotions in relationships, this study posits that understanding a person's emotional vulnerabilities is a significant source to address intergenerational conflicts and communication, which is required for social anthropological understandings around emotions.

Paper long abstract:

Drawing upon the theoretical framework of sociological emotions as elucidated by Lupton (1998) and Hochschild (2003), the emotional vulnerabilities of an individual can be interpreted as a dual manifestation. Firstly, they serve as an accumulated repository, encapsulating subjective experiences that bear witness to resistance within a specific societal context. Secondly, these emotional vulnerabilities function as symbols, reflecting the influence of institutional and socio-cultural constraints that shape an individual's consciousness and determine their social trajectories. These emotional states signify facets of one's corporeal and psychological sovereignty and provide insights into dismantling subjugated identities within the self, such as internalised stigma or compromised identity that peripheral relations have impacted. However, dominant strands still stand for the deeply ingrained assumptions of Cartesian and Freudian psychological interpretations, which conventionally regard personal emotions as individual pathologies or liabilities.

Therefore, the discourse expounded within this paper resonates with the viewpoint advocated by the previously mentioned sociologists, asserting that emotions are the outcomes of socio-cultural influences within relational mechanisms. This assertion suggests that comprehending emotional narratives through anthropological perspectives represents a crucial avenue for reconciling disparate memories and cognitive frameworks about a particular event within a given society. Consequently, in light of the escalating phenomenon of intergenerational conflicts and societal fragmentation, this paper contends that integrating a socio-anthropological approach to personal emotions into educational curricula and psychological counselling procedures can contribute to reconceptualising common sense or normality across generations for their communication.