The M.S. Merian – R. Tagore International Centre of Advanced Studies ‘Metamorphoses of the Political’ (ICAS:MP)

The M.S. Merian – R. Tagore International Centre of Advanced Studies ‘Metamorphoses of the Political’ (ICAS:MP) is an Indo-German research collaboration funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF).

ICAS:MP combines the benefits of an open, interdisciplinary forum for intellectual exchange with the advantages of a cutting-edge research centre. Located in New Delhi, ICAS:MP critically intervenes in global debates in the social sciences and humanities. Through its innovative structure, ICAS:MP aims to generate sustainable research cooperation among leading social science and humanities scholars from India, Germany, and other countries who investigate similar research problems in different world regions. Scholarly exchange and joint exploration within ICAS:MP are defined by a shared interest in examining the shifting boundaries, historically contingent content, and intellectual lineages of the twentieth-century political. It is, thus, not just another initiative to strengthen regionally circumscribed area studies but serves as a unique centre of advanced international and comparative research. ICAS:MP contributes to the recent and increasingly influential debate on decolonial research approaches and the call to ‘decentre’ Germany and Europe in circuits of knowledge production by enabling generalisable and theoretical research from the global south.

Since the inception of ICAS:MP, questions about the shifting nature of the political have been addressed by its members through a sustained empirical focus within the Thematic Modules (TMs). The TMs have been engaging with the ‘Metamorphoses of the Political’ from their distinctive points of departure and multiple theoretical perspectives.

Modules

The TMs have been engaging with the ‘Metamorphoses of the Political’ from their distinctive points of departure and multiple theoretical perspectives.

During the main phase of the project (July 2018–June 2024), research within ICAS:MP was conducted within the following Thematic Modules:

  • Parent Module: Poverty and Education
  • TM1 - History as a political category
  • TM2 - Labour as a political category
  • TM3 - Critiques and renewals of democracy
  • TM4 - Normative conflicts and transformations
  • TM5 - The challenge of gender
  • TM6 - Political economy of growth and distribution
  • TM7 - Media and the Constitution of the Political

From July 2024 onwards, the consortium and the short-term Fellows will continue their work in ‘Thematic Consolidation Groups’. 
These are:

  1. Working Group ‘Theory from the South’
  2. Thematic Consolidation Group ‘Constructing Alternative Pasts: (New) Sources and Methods’
  3. Thematic Consolidation Group ‘The Challenge of Gender’
  4. Thematic Consolidation Group ‘Normative Conflicts and Transformations’: Focus Urban Futures

Thematic Consolidation Group ‘Normative Conflicts and Transformations’

In 2024/25 TCG NCAT will concentrate on ‘Urban Futures: Entrepreneurial states, private capital and new forms of citizenship in the making of cities’. Our research focuses on new contexts of urbanism that involve fundamental shifts in the ways cities are designed, governed and lived in. Contemporary urban life reflects transformations in relationships between the state, markets and citizens. We explore how urban life is influenced by changes across these different registers and levels. As states are exhorted to become more ‘entrepreneurial’ and private capital undertakes ‘state-like’ activities, citizens negotiate varying relationships with the two, both resisting and conforming to new conditions of urban life. This flux, in turn, is the crucible in which new imaginations of the state, the market and personal and social identities are being formed. TCG NCAT is especially interested in exploring i) Urbanism and new forms of exclusion and inclusion; ii) Privatisation, social life and city-making; iii) The rural-urban interface; iv) Democracy and the ‘digital’ turn in urbanism.

TCG NCAT is headed by Prof. Dr. Martin Fuchs (Max-Weber-Kolleg, Erfurt) and Prof. Dr. Vidhu Verma (JNU, New Delhi).

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