Digital resources in the Social Sciences and Humanities OpenEdition Our platforms OpenEdition Books OpenEdition Journals Hypotheses Calenda Libraries OpenEdition Freemium Follow us

Academic Focus: Metamorphoses of the Political

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

 

ICAS:MP’s PIs and Fellows have made critical interventions in debates concerning the key transformations of the political in our time, including realignments of democracy, populism and authoritarianism; the informalization of labour; mediatization; gender; emergency governance; the development of political theory from the South; education and poverty; sustainability and postgrowth; resource rights; (in)justice; religious diversity; social movements, to name a few. Deploying interdisciplinary methods to move beyond established theses and conventional styles of thought, the consolidation of our main phase findings is, if anything, even more relevant to global intellectual debate than when the centre was founded, given the current global context of pandemics, wars and economic crisis. ICAS:MP has, moreover, proven to be a highly successful space for collaboration in knowledge production with scholars from South Asia, uniquely relying on intellectual theory from both North and South.

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