Literacy Activism and the Politics of Writing in India
Francis Cody is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Asian Studies at University of Toronto. His research focuses on written language and the social dynamics of collective political action in southern India. In his first project, he brought these interests to bear on a study of literacy activism, citizenship, and social movement politics in rural Tamilnadu. His second project is centered on the daily newspaper market, and it traces the emergence of populist politics through print-mediated publicity in Tamil cities and small towns. Both of these projects are concerned with developing a theoretical approach that might grasp modes of collective agency which escape our standard vocabularies of community, civil society, and governmentality.
Cody has been working on Tamilnadu in southern India for over a decade now. Taken as a whole, his work contributes to the transdisciplinary project of elaborating a critical social theory of mediation in the postcolonial world. His first book, The Light of Knowledge: Literacy Activism and the Politics of Writing in South India (2013) was awarded the Edward Sapir Book Prize (Society for Linguistic Anthropology).
This talk is co-sponsored by Literacy Studies, Folklore Studies, and Comparative Studies.
Contact: Susan Hanson,hanson.94@osu.edu.
