ICAS:MP Centre of Advanced Studies

Through its innovative transnational structure, ICAS:MP aims to foster sustainable research cooperation among leading humanities and social science scholars from Germany, India and other countries who investigate similar research problems not necessarily confined to the same region. Scholarly exchange and joint exploration within ICAS:MP are defined by a shared interest in examining the shifting boundaries, historically contingent contents, and intellectual lineages of the twentieth century ‘political’. By working comparatively, ICAS:MP highlights the overlapping yet distinctive, trajectories of political processes that have unfolded over the globe.

These questions about the shifting nature of the ‘political’ have been addressed through sustained empirical focus since the inception of the centre in 2015. In our current phase (July 2024-June 2027), the ICAS:MP consortium will investigate the following topics:

• Working Group ‘Theory from the South’
• Thematic Consolidation Group ‘Constructing Alternative Pasts: (New) Sources and Methods’
• Thematic Consolidation Group ‘The Challenge of Gender’
• Thematic Consolidation Group ‘Normative Conflicts and Transformations’: Focus Urban Futures

In the main phase of the project (July 2018-June 2024) ICAS:MP’s research revolved around seven paradigmatic arenas (Thematic Modules) contestation over delimiting the political has been particularly intense:

• TM1: History as a Political Category
• TM2: Labour as a Political Category
• TM3: Critiques and Renewals of Democracy
• TM4: Normative Conflicts and Transformations
• TM5: The Challenge of Gender
• TM6: Political Economy of Growth and Distribution
• TM7: Media and the Constitution of the Political

The Chair of International Relations and European Studies at IPS and the Chair of Indology are – together with our partners in India – mainly involved in the Thematic Consolidation Group (TCG) “The Challenge of Gender”. The TCG (2024–2027) explores themes broadly related to how questions of gender animate political, economic, and social relations, structures and practices in both India and Germany.

For the last four decades, the category of gender has opened up new lines of enquiry, brought forward new methodologies, and has unsettled academic orthodoxies in disciplines such as history, political science, economics, literature, and performance studies. Gender must be an imperative framework in any understanding of the metamorphoses of the political, since it inflects all relationships of power. The changing signification of gender becomes visible at the interface of politics and feminism. Feminism contests constitutive structures of modern political institutions, for instance divisions between public and private, the state and the domestic, and political and civil societies.

We perceive the variety of disciplines in the TCG, such as anthropology, political science, Indology and history, as a challenge to methodology. In our conceptual workshops, we kept asking “What has the category of gender done to the disciplines?” We felt compelled to turn to gender as a framework of analysis and ask how the lens of gender will transform our conceptual frames as well as our methodology. During the main phase (2017-2024) the former TM5 focused on the following set of cross-cultural enquiries:

• (1) “The Lens of Gender: Refiguration of Categories”.
• (2) “Gender, Religion, Performance”.
• (3) “Gender, Migration, Labour”.
• (4) “Gender and Reproductive Technologies”.
• (5) “Gender, Violence and the complexities of Law”.
• (6) “Gender Diversity and the Politics of Identity”.

In the current phase (2024-2027), the TCG will build upon research questions addressed in the main phase of ICAS:MP (2017–2024) by the former TM5, including (1) Care economies and migration within and between India/Germany (2) Gender and life cycles with a focus on ageing (3) Trans *identities (4) Gender dimensions of heterodox/popular and organized/orthodox religiosities (5) Technologies and economics of reproduction (6) a comparative framing of regional feminisms and their vocabularies (7) global gender norms as well as gendered aspects of international relations.

The project has produced publications as well as conferences and workshops  organized by members of IPS India Forum in the framework of ICAS:MP. From IPS, Dr. Philipp Gieg is member of the TCG Committee.