Who knows? Who writes?

By Shalini Nirmal

To write assignments, most of the time, is a boring job. When I began to write this assignment, I thought about the following questions: Why do I need to write this assignment? What are the things I liked about this workshop and the discussions that ensued in class? And what good did this workshop do for me?

Can knowledge be anything and everything?

By Subuhi Jiwani

When I was a child, I was diagnosed as being “hyperactive”. The doctor didn’t specify what kind of hyperactive, but I knew that I wanted to play relay and langdi more than I wanted to read Enid Blyton. I always regretted this as an older person. I’ve scolded myself for not finding the calm to sit down with a book and read it to the end without distraction. This has translated into a fear of buying books: Would those unfinished pages be screaming in cacophonies of their unrecognised lives?

They might not, I discovered, in a book called The Black Swan by Nassem Nicholas Taleb.

Creating Knowledge

We recently completed a workshop with Rahul Srivastava on report writing for the social sciences. From the sound of it, you might imagine it to be a straightforward exercise, which exposed us to techniques, methods, etc. It was much more. It was a philosphical investigation into the idea of knowledge — what it is, where it lies, whose ‘property’ it is. We questioned knowledge with a capital K, what it takes to make knowledge and who can produce it. What follow are student responses to workshop and some reflections on the business of knowledge production.