New Terrains of Consciousness: Globalization, Sensory Environments and Local Cultures of Knowledge

A research collaboration of the Chair of English Literature with the Department of English at Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi, funded by the Indian Ministry of Education under the Scheme for the Promotion of Academic Research and Collaboration (SPARC, 2019-2021). The project is led jointly by Prof. Dr. Isabel Karremann (University of Zurich) and Prof. Dr. Zeno Ackermann (JMU Würzburg), and by Prof. Dr. Simi Malhotra and Prof. Dr. Nishat Zaidi at JMI Delhi.

The novelty and fundamental methodology of the proposed project consists in systematically and transnationally combining sensory studies, ecocriticism and globalization studies. Bringing together these vibrant scholarly discourses in a research project that compares cultural practices and cultural legacies of worldmaking in India, the Anglophone 'West' and Germany will enable new insights in all three fields of research. In particular, we proceed from the conviction that a multilateral focus on the cultural production, intellectual reconstruction and historical transformation of sensory environments will offer new perspectives on 'globalization', i.e. on the ongoing — and often asymmetrical — processes of renegotiating the relationships between 'local' and 'global', 'national' and 'transnational', 'traditional' and 'modern' sites of agency. Using the unique transnational framework facilitated by the SPARC Scheme for assessing various everyday routines and intellectual legacies of sensory worldmaking in relation to the processes, discourses and media of globalization, we hope to contribute to a multilogical phenomenology of globalization and thus to ultimately assist in the evolution of a more symmetrical and more productive discourse of globalization. Throughout, the project will be understood as a combined effort in innovative academic research and in concretely productive academic teaching.