Caste and caste-based practices are understood to be predominantly associated with the Indian subcontinent and broadly Hinduism. This structural, exclusionary process operates on entrenched, subconscious notions of heritable hierarchy, trans-historically modified by capitalism, environmental progressions, liberal democratization, globalization and other complex socioeconomic rocesses. The changing dynamics of these complex social patterns are equally susceptible to postmodern discourses of categories and identities, decolonial and postcolonial critical movements and political imaginaries that range from reification of status quo to challenging the immutability of the nation state.
In this backdrop, contemporary critical scholarship is looking to problematize and critique traditional epistemologies of caste and its relational proxies such as race, ethnicity etc. For
instance, Wilkerson in her recent work Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, offers caste as a mode of analysis to decode other hierarchical social arrangements premised on birth, heredity and other immutable neutral facts. She locates this inquiry in the Third Reich’s subjugation of the Jews and structural racism in contemporary American praxis and history using caste as a problématique. This evolving account of caste as a mode of analysis allows for a broader, textured and intersectional conversations between caste and other hierarchical social formations that operate on human subordination and devaluation, particularly within and across cultural contexts. With the explicit accounts of structural inequality that have been laid bare with the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic, issues of exclusion, stratification, domination and mobilization have become critical to engage with and address. In particular, the post pandemic dynamics of caste and interpolation of political and social factors have raised pertinent questions of structural oppression, access to
health, income and employment, relations of power and production, sustainability and human development.

To take this conversation forward, The Centre for Social Studies (NSOUCSS), School of Social Sciences, Netaji Subhas Open University is organizing an International Webinar on
Caste, Social Formations and Political Mobilization and inviting original papers / research articles related but not limited to the following themes:
● Historical interrogation and/or accounts of caste
● Caste, cultural and social formations
● Political movements around caste and caste-based practices
● Anti-caste resistance movements and approaches
● Economic reflections on caste induced hierarchies
● Intersectional reflections on caste and other identities
● Covid-19 and its impact on caste and caste-based formulations
● Caste, human development and the pandemic predicament

Publication:
Amongst the papers/research articles invited for presentation at the International Webinar, selected papers will be subsequently published, after Double Blind Peer Review process, in an Edited Volume (with ISBN number). The Academic Committee will select the papers for presentation. The Editorial Board will however reserve the right to accept/reject any paper for publication.

Important Dates:
Tentative Date of International Webinar: 14 March 2022*
* Final date to be declared shortly
Date of Submission of Abstracts: 16th January 2022
Date of Intimation of Selected Abstracts: 21st January 2022
Last Date of online Registration: 31st January 2022
Date of Full Paper Submission: 20th February 2022
Last Date of submission of Registration fees: 27th February 2022
Date of Submission of PPT: 7th March 2022

For any further information one may contact:
Debajit Goswami, Organizing Secretary & Assistant Professor of Public Administration, School of Social Sciences, NSOU at debajit007@wbnsou.ac.in 

Registration Link:

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdzMol_vw0hX0tPBtCigys5B9QiVntw...