SASNET has decided to award travel grants to three doctoral students at Lund University. They will use the grant to fund their fieldwork in India and Sri Lanka during the coming months.
Soumi Banerjee: "Performing legitimacy in shrinking spaces: Indian INGOs manoeuvring strategies and practices towards manifesting legitimacy"
About the project
Soumi Banerjee is a doctoral student at the School of Social Work, and will use her travel grant to cover expenses during data collection with international nongovernmental organisations (INGOs) in Kolkata, New Delhi and Bangalore.
Her research project studies how INGOs in India manoeuvre a politically hostile environment in which INGOs are increasingly getting banned from operating and abrogated from foreign funding on ‘anti-national’ and ‘anti-developmental' charges.
Tabita Rosendal: “Fragmented Power: Chinese Governance Practices of the 21st Century Maritime Silk Road”
About the project
Tabita Rosendal is a doctoral student at the Centre for East and South-East Asian Studies. Her project aims to analyse and discuss Chinese governance practices of the Maritime Silk Road (MSR) portion of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).
More specifically, her project focuses on the relationship between the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) strategic pursuits and the role that China’s state-owned enterprises (SOEs) play in the implementation and governance of BRI projects.
As case studies for the project, she will focus on the Hambantota Port and Colombo Port in Sri Lanka. These ports are some of the most widely discussed examples within academic and policy circles of China’s implementation of the BRI.
The travel grant will cover Rosendal's planned interviews with Chinese and Sri Lankan stakeholders who currently reside in Sri Lanka and work on or in fields adjacent to the port projects related to the BRI.
Learn more about Tabita Rosendal's research during our upcoming brown bag seminar next Tuesday.
Sunny Gurumayum: "Vernacular Formation of Homophobia in Manipur"
About the project
Sunny Gurumaym, doctoral student at the Department of Gender Studies, studies how the word ‘homo’ is articulated in different ways in India, with a particular focus on the state of Manipur.
The project aims to understand the experiences of gay men as well as queer and transgender people from Manipur who are conceived of as male at birth and are affected by the term ‘homo’. Through a series of interviews, Gurumayum will analyse the oral circulation of the word ‘homo’ — as an epithet, an insult, a teasing, a slur and an idiom — and how its multiple meanings are related to the failings of masculinity.
