At the time of writing this blog, I have just signed off from a wonderful virtual conversation with our graduate team from IIT Bombay who will be participating in our Cairo workshop in February 2024. The range of expertise in this group has invigorated my passion for research and compelled me to read up on…
In preparation for the GPRI’s second workshop — a cross-institutional experiment set to be held in Cairo, Egypt in a few short weeks — me and my fellow research assistants, Sara Ameri and Fahimeh Ghorbani are facilitating a series of conversations with the project’s invited graduate student participants. Our invited grads come from multiple institutions…
Among the host of ways in which the European epistemic paradigms have constructed and dominated the rest of the world, the forced historiographical taxonomy of time is the most consequential in dictating how previously colonized societies see themselves historically. Often divided into neatly charted categories of classical, medieval, and modern periods, world histories have been theorised…
Academic disciplines can be notoriously resistant to change, particularly when the need for change arises from within the established epistemic structures used for analyzing and categorizing the world. This rigidity often means that, even when we discuss and advocate for change in academic settings, it does not necessarily lead to a fundamental transformation in how…
The short answer is, yes. Thinking beyond “Theory” has been going on long before the Greeks called their way of thinking “Philosophy” and the modern Western academy claimed “a” way of thinking as “the” way of thinking. The history of epistemology from a non-European perspective — a perspective that is informed not only by the…
Rethinking, Remaking is a place to engage and reflect on the cutting-edge research our team of scholars is doing to reorient the discourse on the study of the global past in modern humanities. We, at the Global Past Research Initiative (GPRI), consider this reorientation a necessary intervention in the existing discourses dealing with the global,…
We’re currently preparing for the launch of our monthly blog series, Rethinking, Remaking, curated by GPRI Co-Project Manager, Aqsa Ijaz. As a teaser for the type of content you can expect to enjoy, here’s a reflection on the muqarnas as a model for collaborative research in the humanities, written by our very own Jill Caskey,…