Cross-cultural and Cross-disciplinary Collaborations: Gender, Space, and Precariousness in Asia
Since 2010, Professor Helle Rydström and Dr. Anindita Datta collaborated in both research and teaching. Underlying their collaboration is the exploration of gender, space, and precariousness in Asia. Their research seeked to redress the paucity of knowledge about ways in which gendered spaces in rural and urban settings in Asia constitute particular arenas which provide the socio-cultural, political, and economic conditions that allow for the abuse of various groups – especially women, girls, and other marginalized and vulnerable groups such as ethnic minorities and people with disabilities.
The ways in which gender, space, and precariousness underpins their collaboration is indicated by their jointly authored publications and Linnaeus-Palme program. The Linnaeus-Palme program, with a focus on gender and space, was initiated in 2013 and granted funding for two sequential phases, with the second face closing in the fall of 2016. Their collaboration under the Erasmus Mundus program, granted to Dr. Datta in 2012, was devoted to identifying the scientific and pedagogical synergy effects of integrating gender and space. The Linnaeus-Palme program as well as the Erasmus Mundus program enabled Dr. Datta to spend longer periods as Visiting Fellow at Lund University, allowing her to develop close relationships with the scholarly community at Lund University. The collaboration between the Department of of Gender Studies at Lund University and the Department of Geography at the Delhi School of Economics has led to good scholarly and pedagogical results for both departments. In this project, Dr. Datta and Professor Rydström built on the solid platform which they have developed over the years by infusing a Global South perspective on space and gender in the Lund Gender Studies Department on the one hand, and strengthening the gender component in the Delhi Geography Department on the other.