The Centre for Policy Studies is organising a talk by Dr. Nandini Deo, Lehigh University, United States.
Abstract
One of the key characteristics of India’s democracy has been the existence of a robust civil society. This civil society sphere operates within regulatory frameworks created by the state. In this talk, Nandini Deo provides a history of state-civil society relations in order to assess the role civil society can play in Indian politics today. Recent developments in public policy are discussed such as the passage of CSR requirements that direct corporate funds to NGOs, the crackdown on Foreign Contributions Regulation Act (FCRA) violations by trusts and NGOs, the turn from rights based language to universal welfare provision by the developmental state. How should we understand this moment? Is today’s policy making actually restricting space for civil society or merely channeling it in particular directions?
About the Speaker
Nandini Deo is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania, USA. Her research is at the intersection of religion, feminism, and social movements in South Asia. Deo serves as a book review editor for Politics, Religion and Ideology. She is active in the Women and Politics and Religion and Politics sections of the American Political Science Association. She is now editing a volume for Bloomsbury Press called Feminisms Beyond the Secular, which looks at how critiques of secularism have created new opportunities for feminist engagement with religion and politics. She is also running a project on corporate philanthropy in India. Deo teaches courses on religion, gender, social movements, comparative politics, and political theory. This year she is co-leading a faculty seminar on Populism with Ziad Munson with the Sociology department. A detailed profile can be found here.
Image: dcastor via. Wikimedia Commons
