Research Areas
* Peace Research: We have been organizing conferences and undertaking projects forsocial healing since last many years so that we can understand the nature of conflict in these areas and use the creative tension to articulate new theories of peace and justice. Now we would like to undertake a project on Mapping Conflict Zones in India and try to explore the methods and institutions
based on local practices of dialogues in Asian society. We have published a book on "Wounded History: Religion, Conflict, Psyche and Social Healing". The papers of global conference on 'Wounded History and Social Healing: Asian Experiences' is in the process of being published. We are also working on the papers of another conference "Indo-South Africa Dialogue on Human Rights". This conference was organized to reflect on the usefulness of Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa for India. As it is well known that they have taken this idea of this commission from Gandhi's philosophy, we think it is possible to carve out many such models of peace building based on the Asian experiences.
* Democracy & Development: Many of our friends in different universities have been working on the issues related to Democracy and Development. This programme would like to bring them together. A conference was organized with this title by one of the members of the group and the papers are in the process being ready for publication. We would like to undertake projects of constituency development under this program. The idea is to develop micro development plans for smaller units and help the representatives in maintaining constant contacts with the people at the grassroots level and also helping new political leaders in understanding the Indian political system. We try to maintain constituency level data for developmental planning.
* Religion & Society: Since 1990, a community of concern scholars has been meeting and discussing the issues related to religion and the consensus is that people in multicultural/religious societies should be exposed to each others' culture and religion. Under this programme we would like to undertake research projects to explore issues like peace, justice, welfare, social change, environmental security etc. We would like to see if there is any scope for reading the texts of different religions from the perspective of people. We would like to develop programs for school going children to overcome the stereotypical images of the religions and communities. We treat all religions as knowledge systems and as resources forhumanity as a whole.
* Knowledge & Practice: Asian societies are full of diversities in terms of knowledge systems and their practices. This seems to be high time to map them and document them. We undertook a project to explore the practices of Nyaya philosophy in Mithila. This philosophy is now being taught in Cambridge, Oxford and many American Universities. But the people of the area where it grew and flourished do not take it seriously. We want to reclaim our authorship of these philosophies and promote practices that can give impetus to further research in these fields. Foundation is interested in conducting research in the field of educational practices and help in developing best of the practices to suit the needs of the marginalized people of the country.
* Social Science Research Method: Indian social reality is complex and defies the established social science research techniques. We would like to organize annual international conferences so that research method could be discussed with a discursive community and the innovations are shared among the members of this community of scholars.
