This special set of joint events run by Oxford’s African Studies and South Asian Studies Centres focuses on activism and researching activism. In celebrating the global South’s rich experience of popular challenges to injustice, inequality and repression, these seminars will hear presentations from leading civic activists, speaking alongside academics who have researched political and social issues and activist challenges to them.

This special set of joint events run by Oxford’s African Studies and South Asian Studies Centres focuses on activism and researching activism. In celebrating the global South’s rich experience of popular challenges to injustice, inequality and repression, these seminars will hear presentations from leading civic activists, speaking alongside academics who have researched political and social issues and activist challenges to them.

The final years of the Sri Lankan civil war were transformed by a significant development in the technics of photography. In the mid-2000s, increasingly accessible compact digital cameras and mobile phones in the hands of an eager public rapidly supplanted film photography. Unrestrained by finite exposures or time-consuming and costly processing, hundreds of images could be immediately generated, viewed, modified, stored or transmitted globally by a single device.

The twentieth century was a period which saw debates on ecology, cytology, genetics and eugenics in the West develop in new and interesting ways both positive and negative to understand the position of humans within the natural world and ultimately leading to a non-racist science. This paper explores the history of these debates in the context of Britain and India, the scientific networks that emerged and the contribution of neglected colonial scientists an important new field in the history of science, one which has gone unexplored in the context of these discussions.

Suryakant Waghmore and Hugo Gorringe will discuss their recent edited volume on civility in India. Democracy and its success can very often be reduced to political institutions and procedures, but democracy has socio-cultural meanings and has always carried with it the possibility that the majority might tyrannize minorities. The vote for Brexit in Britain and the presidential election of Donald Trump in the USA arguably signify growing solidarity on racial and ethnic lines in these western democracies.

The years that immediately followed their partition offer many interesting insights into the shaping of the India- Pakistan dynamic. Although both countries went to war over Kashmir within a few months of their independence, there were also parallel processes of collaborative dialogue based on the requirements of state consolidation.