King’s India Institute and the Royal Anthropological Institute cordially invite you to the

MN SRINIVAS MEMORIAL LECTURE 2014

Professor Arjun Appadurai (New York University)

The Ecology of Failure: Reflections on Democracy, Participation and Development

Thursday 27 March at 6:15 pm
 
Venue: EDMOND J SAFRA LECTURE THEATRE, King’s College London, Strand, London WC2R 2LS
 
The lecture will be followed by a wine reception in Chapters, King’s College London, from 7:30 to 9:00 pm
 
For inquiries and RSVP, please contact: india-institute@kcl.ac.uk
 
The experience of the developing world, including India, since the beginnings of major international development projects in the 1940’s, has not been a happy one. In spite of billions of dollars of Euro-American development funding, poverty and inequality have deepened, while wealth at the top has increased. In part, this failure is reflected in the failure of grassroots efforts to bring in women, lower castes and other marginalized groups into deliberative processes and fora. In this year’s Professor M N Srinivas Annual Lecture, Professor Arjun Appadurai examines this failure, and proposes an alternative view of the nature of this participatory failure and a new perspective on how to think about failure in social and political life.
 
Arjun Appadurai is the Goddard Professor in Media, Culture and Communication at New York University, where he is also Senior Fellow at the Institute for Public Knowledge.  He also serves as Tata Chair Professor at The Tata Institute for Social Sciences in Mumbai. He was previously Senior Advisor for Global Initiatives at The New School in New York City, where he also held a Distinguished Professorship as the John Dewey Distinguished Professor in the Social Sciences. Arjun Appadurai was the Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs at The New School from 2004-2006. He was formerly the William K. Lanman Jr. Professor of International Studies, Professor of Anthropology, and Director of the Center on Cities and Globalization at  Yale University. Appadurai is the founder and now the President of PUKAR (Partners for Urban Knowledge Action and Research), a non-profit organization based in and oriented to the city of Mumbai (India).