India China Institute Celebrates Student Research Award Recipients During its Annual India China Day Event
The India China Institute (ICI) celebrated the return of its in-person India China Day celebration, featuring presentations by its 2022–2023 Student Fellows. These students are recipients of the Starr Foundation Student Research Award, funded by The Starr Foundation, which offers undergraduate and graduate students grants to support an independent study project or to use toward the costs of attending a New School program in India or China.
“This is a very big day—this is the first India China Day we’ve been able to do in person since 2019, for reasons you can obviously guess,” said Mark Frazier, co-director of ICI. “It’s a big moment in the history of ICI to return to live in-person programming and to have with us seven very special guests and presenters. These are the recipients of the travel/research grants that were awarded last fall.” During the event, seven recipients shared brief presentations of their work:
- Adhip Amin, MA Historical Studies: “At Sea: Forging Empire with Coal and Water in Nineteenth Century Western Indian Ocean”
- Sebastian Anaya, MS Environmental Policy and Sustainability Management: “2020-2021 Farmers’ Protests in Northern India”
- Robert Burns, BA Anthropology, “Set and Settings: Hong Kong Psychedelia”
- Aditi Dey, PhD Politics: “Public Sector Undertakings: Nehru’s ‘Temples of Modern India’”
- Leila Lin, PhD Anthropology: “Early Takeaways from Remote Fieldwork in China”
- Chang Liu, PhD student Sociology: “The (Post-) Socialist Work Ethic in China: A Case Study of Healthcare Workers”
- Liuchang Tan, PhD Sociology: “Being Creative in a Post-Pandemic World: Knowledge, Gender, and Identity in a Chinese Maker Community”
The ICI has become a leading center for research and public engagement on India, China, and their relations with other countries. It addresses issues of global concern through collaborative research and by creating and sustaining transnational networks of scholars and practitioners based in India, China, and elsewhere around the world. The student travel awards are an extension of that philosophy, helping students build a community with an international vision and bringing people closer together.
“It’s a tradition for ICI to support student fellowship and to support our students at The New School,” said Grace Hou, ICI deputy director during the event. “The last year was restrictive, but in spite of those difficulties, four of our students were able to make it to their research sites. And all of our people, even if they were unable to go to the sites, did their research online and through archives. The process of doing this research—whether they are presenting a finding or refining their research questions—hopefully is valuable to them, and our audience will find it useful.”
The awards program, launched in 2006, is open to full-time students of all disciplines at The New School who are looking to expand their knowledge of India, China, or both. Frazier stated that this year’s presentations were an “amazing batch of what turned out to be a lot of social science and history-focused papers—political economy, labor, capital—a really amazing set of presentations, but we also of course welcome proposals from students in performing arts and design.”