Engaging India: Grants for Deepening Georgetown’s Relationships in India
Dear colleagues,
The Faculty Steering Group on India is pleased to announce awards totaling $112,500 for seven Engaging India Grants (short project descriptions follow). The grant program is part of a broader effort to secure Georgetown’s position among globally recognized research universities by encouraging meaningful engagement in the major countries of the world, and especially in the world’s largest emerging economies. With support from the President, the Provost, and the Deans of the Law Center and Georgetown College, these grants will support faculty interest in India and build the University’s capacity to undertake future work there. A central goal of the grants is to foster relationships in India and to develop institutional networks that benefit both the individual scholars involved, and the broader Georgetown community.
We are pleased that so many colleagues used this process as an opportunity to consider how they might engage India in their research and teaching. In total, we received 22 proposals. Because of the highly competitive nature of the process, we were unable to support all worthy proposals. We were heartened to learn that colleagues found the application process valuable in itself for refining their research agendas and making connections with others at Georgetown who share their interests.
As the projects progress, we will invite the grant recipients to share reflections on their work with the rest of the Georgetown community through public events and reporting on the Georgetown and India web site.
I wish to thank my fellow committee members for their contributions to this program. They join me in thanking our program manager, Philip Thomas, for keeping us so well organized.
Best regards,
Carol Lancaster
Dean, School of Foreign Service
Chair, Faculty Steering Group on India
Engaging India Grants 2011
Justice for Women: A Joint Project of Georgetown Law Center’s Community Justice Project (CJP) in partnership with The Advocacy Project and Vikalp Women’s Group
Jane Aiken, Community Justice Project, Georgetown University Law Center
CJP will develop a program for Law Center students to support and learn from Vikalp, an Indian NGO that works to combat discrimination against rural women in Gujarat, India. This partnership seeks to produce several important outcomes: cutting edge clinical and experiential learning opportunities for Georgetown students, a strong foundation for future cooperation, and a model that can be scaled up and sustained.
Do self-help groups increase investments in public goods?
Raj Desai, School of Foreign Service
Shareen Joshi, School of Foreign Service
This project examines the extent to which participation in Self-Help Groups (SHGs) increases the willingness of participants to invest in public goods. In past research, Desai and Joshi have used a randomized control trial framework to examine the impact of SHGs on the lives of women over a two-year period. They have found that participation increases savings, awareness of financial opportunities, participation in household decisions regarding children’s education and health, and participation in community activities. In this new research, Desai and Joshi seek to use new qualitative and experimental methods to examine whether women’s willingness to invest in public goods increases through participation in such programs.
Jurisprudence on the Right to Health
Lawrence Gostin, O’Neill Insitute for National and Global Health Law
This project seeks to expand on the O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law’s collaboration with the Lawyers Collective, an Indian public interest service provider, to collect, analyze, translate, and disseminate research on jurisprudence and the right to health. The O’Neill Institute will develop comprehensive open-access repositories of rights-based case law based at the O’Neill Institute, Lawyers Collective, and other interested organizations. This collaboration is intended to lay the foundation for continuing and evolving analyses of such jurisprudence both in India and throughout the world.
Bioethics as a Means of Engagement: Focus on India
Doris Goldstein and Laura Bishop, Kennedy Institute of Ethics
This grant will support a 12 day, multi-site visit to India by two members of the Kennedy Institute of Ethics (KIE) and Bioethics Research Library (BRL) to identify and explore potential partnerships on three separate domains related to learning and scholarship within bioethics: 1) library and research infrastructure; 2) study abroad possibilities for Georgetown University students; and 3) continuing education for professionals in bioethics-related fields. The broad goal is to build relationships and explore possible joint ventures that would advance emerging priorities of the KIE/BRL.
Innovative Activity in the Indian Software Industry utilized in Joint Graduate Business Student Program with IIM-Bangalore
Stanley Nollen, McDonough School of Business
The grant supports a research study with collaborators at IIM-Bangalore on innovative activity in Indian software firms, whose results will be used to develop new curricular material for a joint graduate student program in which the McDonough School of Business has been invited by IIM-B to participate.
Three-way research workshops between The Georgetown Institute of Global History, the Center for Historical Studies of Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, and the Department of History of King’s College London
Aparna Vaidik, Department of History
The project will develop three-way research workshops between The Georgetown Institute of Global History, the Center for Historical Studies of Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, and the Department of History of King’s College London. The goal of the project is to create productive synergies by bringing together researchers who have similar analytical interests, but different regional foci.
Developing collaborations and institutional agreements in Chemistry and Physics
Richard Weiss, Department of Chemistry
Makarand Paranjape, Department of Physics
This grant will support a symposium to be co-convened by Georgetown's Departments of Chemistry and Physics and their counterparts at leading Indian universities. The symposium will serve as a platform for sharing recent scholarship, enhancing collaboration, and building awareness of Georgetown science programs among Indian researchers and prospective Georgetown graduate students.
Members of Steering Group on India
Reena Aggarwal, Victor Cha, Victoria Jennings, Shareen Joshi, Carol Lancaster (Chair), John Langan, John Mikhail, Paula Newberg, Makarand Paranjape, Jessica Raper, Samuel Robfogel, and R. Kent Weaver.
Further information
Please direct general questions about the grants or the University’s engagements with India to Mr. Samuel Robfogel, International Initiatives, Office of the Provost, ssr2@georgetown.edu or 7-9603.