Prof Raminder Kaur Kahlon

Biography

Raminder Kaur was awarded her PhD at SOAS. She has held post-doctoral research positions at Brunel University (ESRC funded project 'Reconsidering Ethnicity'), University of East Anglia (Getty Research Fellow) and at the University of Manchester (Simon-Marks Fellow). She was previously a Lecturer at the University of Manchester.

Community and Business

Raminder has numerous contacts with the arts and heritage sector. As well as being a practitioner, she has held consultancies on the arts, heritage and diversity with the Greater London Authority, National Trust, Science Museum, English Heritage and the Museum of London amongst others.

She served on the Mayor's Commission for Asian and African Heritage (MCAAH) and was a member of the subsequent Heritage Diversity Task Force at the Greater London Authority. She co-authored the MCAAH report, Delivering Shared Heritage, which received the Eurocities Award for Cooperation in Gdansk, in 2007. (Eurocities is a membership network of major European cities that brings together local governments of more than 130 large cities).

She was a Trustee for Museums, Libraries and Archives London and Honorary Treasurer for the Association for Social Anthropologists (ASA) as well as ASA representative for the World Council of Anthropological Associations (WCAA). She is Chair of the WCAA Ethics Taskforce and a member of the WCAA Advocacy and Outreach Taskforce chaired by Virginia Dominguez.

She was Artistic Director of the theatre group, Chandica Arts, and is currently Chair of the arts organisation, Aldaterra Projects http://aldaterra.com/

She has produced several scripts for theatre productions including Draupadi’s Robes, Bullets through the Golden  Stream, Futures, Spirit of the Age, and Pregnant  Pauses. Her most recent play was when she worked on Ben Rogaly's AHRC Fellowship, Places for All?, and wrote Fair's (Not) Fair! based on about 100 oral history transcripts collated by Ben Rogaly and Kaveri Qureshi in Peterborough. She has also made three short films  based on the workshops, rehearsals and performances with young people and professional actors:

(1) Fun Fear about kaleidoscopic experiences and stories about the funfair. (2) Peopleborough - an audio-visual stroll through people's lives, histories and interracial relations in Peterborough. (3) Turning the Mirror about dreams and reflections on birth, death, trouble and peace. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JfvSzgrEMqs

Raminder Kaur works in three broad research areas:

(i) public culture, aesthetics, censorship, history and politics in South Asia

(ii) diaspora, race/ethnicity, the creative arts and heritage 

(iii) public representations of, and the socio-political and environmental implications of nuclear developments

Raminder's monograph, Performative Politics and the Cultures of Hinduism focuses on Maharashtra's foremost festival dedicated to the elephant-headed god, Ganesh (Ganapati). With the focus on this multifaceted festival, she considers the dynamics of vernacular artworks, performance, spectacle and politics in differing historical contexts. The work is less an enquiry into institutional politics, but rather how politics are expressed and disseminated through an array of channels that are easily accessible to the illiterate and/or subaltern classes.

Her co-edited volume Censorship in South Asia (with William Mazzarella) investigates the regulation of public culture from a variety of angles - from the cinema to advertising, from street politics to political communication, and from the adjudication of blasphemy to the management of obscenity. The contributions broaden the understanding of what censorship might mean - beyond the simple restriction and silencing of public communication - by considering censorship's productive potential and its intimate relation to its apparent opposite, 'publicity'.

Her co-authored volume, Diaspora and Hybridity (with Virinder Kalra and John Hutnyk), explores the history and social contexts of these two key concepts. Her particular chapters concentrate on the extent to which diaspora is a racialised concept, and highlight the significance of gendered identities in any enquiry on international migration. The topic was broached in her earlier co-edited volume (with John Hutnyk) when she was a student, Travel Worlds: Journeys in Contemporary Cultural Politics, that includes academic articles, poetry and fiction on non-Eurocentric perspectives on travel.

Her co-edited volume, Bollyworld: Popular Indian Cinema through a Transnational Lens (with Ajay Sinha), combines her interests in South Asian and diasporic cultures. The volume considers Indian popular film from transnational angles in terms of its production histories; its borrowed and contributing aesthetics, styles and plots; and its distribution and modes of reception in several places around the world including Britain, US, Guyana, Germany Nigeria and South Africa.

Her forthcoming co-edited volume with Parul Dave-Mukherji is based on plenary and panel papers presented at the annual Association of Social Anthropologists conference at Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi, Arts and Aesthetics in a Globalising World, in 2012.

Her recent research revolves around public representations of nuclear issues (supported by a BA and an ESRC research grant), and written into her most recent monograph, Atomic Mumbai: Living with the Radiance of a Thousand Suns (with the help of an AHRC Research Leave award). The book provides a historical and ethnographic study of perceptions and representations of nuclear power and bombs, of those based in the city of Mumbai — a prime site for nuclear establishments in India since the mid-1940s. The chapters focus on the percolation of nuclear issues in popular culture such as print media, films, documentaries, superhero comics and advertising. The research has led to an enquiry into the socio-political and environmental implications of nuclear power plants, published in articles and a forthcoming book.

I welcome D.Phil proposals on any of my areas of research interest in South Asia and Britain as well as in other regions. Current and past D.Phil. students include:

Benji Zeitlyn: 'Growing up Glocal in London and Sylhet' (AHRC, awarded in 2010).

Sarah Joshi: 'The Diasporic Romance: The NRI Trope and Interracial Transgression in Popular Indian Cinema' (awarded in 2012 after 3 years)

Yacine Korid: 'Living on the Edge: An Exploration of the Parisian Periphery'

Zahra Jalaeipour: ‘Transformations of Hijab: A Study of Diasporic Shi’i Iranian Women Living in London’

Shrikant Borkar: 'DFID and Dalits: An Ethnographic Study of the Department for International Development's Approach towards Dalits as Socially Excluded in India' (Voice of Dalit International)

Benjamin Dix: ‘Graphic Violence: Representing the Sri Lankan Civil War through Narrative, Illustrations and Photography’, a part of a 50: 50 D.Phil. programme involving the production of a 40,000 word thesis and a graphic novel based on the civil war in Sri Lanka http://www.thevanni.co.uk/The_Vanni.html

Faisal Syed Mohammed: 'Islamic Legal Authority in Postcolonial India: Constituting a Community in the Contemporary Deccan' (Commonwealth Scholarship)

Violeta Vajda: 'Ending Centuries of Submission? The Response of a 'Caramidari' Roma Pentecostal Community in Transylvania to the Twin Challenges of Development and Racism'

 

 

Student Consultation

Spring semester 2-4 Tuesdays. Please email for appointment or for any other times if not convenient.

Kaur, Raminder (2014) The nuclear imaginary and Indian popular films. South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, 37 (2). ISSN 0085-6401 (In Press)

Kaur, Raminder and Dave-Mukherji, Parul (2014) Arts and aesthetics in a globalising world. ASA, 51 . Berg, London. (In Press)

KaurKahlon, Raminder (2013) Sovereignty without hegemony, the nuclear state, and a 'secret public hearing' in India. Theory, Culture and Society, 30 (3). pp. 3-28. ISSN 0263-2764

Kaur, Raminder (2013) The fictions of science and cinema in India. In: Routledge handbook of Indian cinema. Routledge, Abingdon and New York. ISBN 9780415677745

Kaur, Raminder (2013) Atomic schizophrenia: Indian reception of the atomic attacks in Japan, 1945. Cultural Critique, 84. (In Press)

Kaur, Raminder (2013) Atomic Mumbai: living with the radiance of a thousand suns. Routledge, India. ISBN 978-0-415-65593-4

KaurKahlon, Raminder (2013) From 'temples of modernity' to 'post-liberal kitsch': the many lives of nuclear monuments in India. South Asian Studies, 29 (1). ISSN 0266-6030

Kaur, Raminder (2013) The power and limits of numbers: an ethnography of a survey on background radiation and health. ASA online: Journal of Association of Social Anthropologists. ISSN 2073-4158

KaurKahlon, Raminder (2012) The Transnational Potentiality of Transverse Politics. Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power, 19 (4). pp. 452-466. ISSN 1070-289X

KaurKahlon, Raminder (2012) Nuclear Power vs People Power. Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. ISSN 0096-3402

Alexander, Claire, Kaur, Raminder and St Louis, Brett (2012) Identities: new directions in uncertain times. Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power, 19 (1). pp. 1-7. ISSN 1070-289X

Mazzarella, William and Kaur Kahlon, Raminder (2012) Between sedition and seduction: thinking censorship in South Asia. In: Routledge handbook of media law. Routledge handbooks . Routledge, Abingdon and New York. ISBN 9780415683166

Kaur, Raminder (2011) Atomic comics: parabolic mimesis and the graphic fictions of science. International Journal of Cultural Studies, 15 (4). pp. 329-347. ISSN 1367-8779

Kaur, Raminder (2011) 'Ancient cosmopolitanism' and the South Asian diaspora. South Asian Diaspora, 3 (2). pp. 197-213. ISSN 1943-8192

Kaur, Raminder (2009) Heritage at the crossroads. In: Unset Greater London Authority.

Mazzarella, William and Kaur, Raminder (2009) Between Sedition and Seduction: Thinking Censorship in South Asia. In: Censorship in South Asia: Cultural Regulation from Sedition to Seduction. Indiana University Press, pp. 1-28. ISBN 9780253220936

Kaur, Raminder and Mazzarella, William, eds. (2009) Censorship in South Asia: Cultural regulation from Sedition to Seduction. Indiana University Press. ISBN 9780253220936

Kaur, Raminder (2009) Gods, Bombs and the Social Imaginary. In: South Asian Cultures of the Bomb: Atomic Publics and the State in India and Pakistan. Indiana University Press, pp. 150-172. ISBN 9780253220325

Kaur, Raminder (2007) Spectacles of Nationalism in the Ganapati Utsav of Maharashtra. In: Picturing the Nation. Orient Longman, New Delhi. ISBN 9788125029083

Barrow, Jocelyn, Kaur , Raminder and et al, (2005) Delivering shared heritage: the Mayor's Commission on African and Asian heritage. Project Report. Greater London Authority, London.

Kaur, Raminder (2005) Unearthing our past: engaging with diversity at the Museum of London. Discussion Paper. Museum of London, London.

Kalra, Virinder S, Kaur, Raminder and Hutnyk, John (2005) Diaspora and Hybridity. Theory, Culture and Society . Sage.

Kaur, Raminder and Sinha, Ajay J, eds. (2005) Bollyworld: Popular Indian cinema through a transnational lens. Sage. ISBN 9780761933212

Kaur, Raminder (2005) Performative Politics and the Cultures of Hinduism: Public Uses of Religion in Western India. Anthem South Asian Studies . Anthem Press. ISBN 9781843311393

Kaur, Raminder (2004) At the Ragged Edges of Time: The Legend of Tilak and the Normalization of Historical Narratives. South Asia Research, 24 (2). pp. 185-202. ISSN 0262-7280

Kaur, Raminder (2004) Fire in the belly: the mobilization of the Ganapati festival in Maharashtra. In: The politics of cultural mobilization in India. Oxford University Press, New Delhi; New York, pp. 37-70. ISBN 9780195668018

Kaur, Raminder (2004) Digits from the Dada: Pointers to the Articulation of Sainik Role Models in Mumbai. In: Playing for Real: Hindu Role Models, Religion, and Gender. Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK, pp. 51-80. ISBN 9780195667226

Kaur, Raminder (2003) Westenders: Whiteness, Women and Sexuality in Southall, UK. In: Gender and Ethnicity in Contemporary Europe. BERG, pp. 199-222. ISBN 9781859736524

Kaur, Raminder (2003) Explosive Narratives: The Articulation of 'Nuclear Knowledge' in Mumbai. In: Negotiating Local Knowledge: Power and Identity in Development. Pluto Press, pp. 51-74. ISBN 9780745320069

Kaur, Raminder (2002) Martial Imagery in Western India: The Changing Face of Ganapati from the 1890s. South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, 25 (1). pp. 69-96. ISSN 0085-6401

Kaur, Raminder (2001) Rethinking the Public Sphere: the Ganapati Festival and Media Competitions in Mumbai. South Asia Research, 21 (1). pp. 23-50. ISSN 0262-7280

Kaur , Raminder and Banerjea, Partha (2000) Jazzgeist: racial signs in twisted times. Theory, Culture and Society, 17 (3). pp. 159-180. ISSN 0263-2764

Kaur Kahlon, Raminder (2000) Dramas of Diaspora. International Journal of Punjab Studies, 17 (2).

Kaur , Raminder and Hutnyk, John, eds. (1999) Travel worlds: journeys in contemporary cultural politics. Zed Books, London; New York. ISBN 978-1856495615

Kaur, Raminder and Hutnyk, John (1999) Introduction. In: Travel Worlds: Journeys in Contemporary Cultural Politics. Zed Books.

Kaur, Raminder (1999) Parking the Snout in Goa. In: Travel Worlds: Journeys in Contemporary Cultural Politics. Zed Books, London, UK, pp. 155-172. ISBN 9781856495622

Kaur Kahlon, Raminder and Kalra, Varinder (1996) New Paths for South Asian Identity and Musical Creativity. In: Dis-orienting Rhythms: The Politics of the New Asian Dance Music. Zed Books, pp. 217-231. ISBN ISBN 9781856494700