[csaa-forum] Seminar by Michiel Baas Friday 27th June 6 pm

[Devleena Ghosh]

Dear friends

Please come to another seminar (we are really cooking with gas in  
June) in the week following Anand Pandian's seminar when Michiel Baas  
will be presenting on a topical issue: Indian students in Melbourne.

Dear friends
Please come to this presentation by Dr Michiel Baas from  
International Institute of Asian Studies, Amsterdam hosted by the  
Sydney South Asia Seminar Group/Trans/forming Cultures Research Centre.

I would also be grateful if you could pass it along through your  
networks

Thanks
Devleena

Day Friday
Date 27th June
Time 6 pm
Venue UTS Bldg3, rm210, enter via 755 Harris St

Newcomers & the ‘Locally Established’:

Indian overseas students and the local Indian community in Melbourne,  
Australia.

As statistics show, the propensity of Indian overseas students in  
Australia applying for permanent residency (PR, in short) after  
graduation is very high; nearly three quarters are expected to do so.  
As the number of Indian overseas students is increasing considerably,  
so does the number of permanently settled Indians in Australia. It is  
on the ambivalent relationship between Indian overseas students and  
the locally established Indian community that I wish to focus in this  
presentation. Central to my analysis will be the role the local  
Indian community plays in the lives of Indian overseas students; how  
they see and interact with each other as well as how they profit from  
each other. It will be argued that Indian students are seen to be a  
threat to the image the Indian community has of itself; an image  
which they also ‘imagine’ (white/Anglo-Saxon) Australians to have of  
them. Although Indian students generally come to Australia to  
undertake their Masters’ degrees, the fact that the majority enrol at  
lower ranking ‘cheap’ universities makes them ‘suspect’ in the eyes  
of the community. The jobs they seem to find after graduation (taxi  
driving, waiting tables) further threatens the image the community  
has of itself. In order to analyze this further I will make use of  
anthropological literature on the Indian diaspora as well as the way  
success and failure have been conceptualized in the literature on  
migration and transnationalism.


Short Curriculum Vitae

Michiel Baas obtained his BA degree in International Management in  
1998, and studied Cultural Anthropology & Non-Western Sociology from  
2000-2003. He did research among the IT professionals of Bangalore  
(India) for his MA thesis and graduated (cum laude) in December 2003.  
In March 2004 he joined the Amsterdam School for Social Science  
Research (University of Amsterdam) as a PhD student. His project is  
entitled: “Flexible Transnationalism - Displaced Indian Overseas  
Students In Between Legality and Illegality in India and Australia.  
If all goes well his dissertation will be submitted in July, 2008. He  
is also currently the branch office coordinator of the International  
Institute for Asian Studies (IIAS) in Amsterdam.


(Dr) Devleena Ghosh
Associate Professor, Social Inquiry Program
Bon Marche (Bldg 3), room 550 (enter via Harris St)

Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences
University of Technology, Sydney
Australia

Postal address: PO Box 123, Broadway, NSW 2007, Australia
Phone and Voice Mail: +61-2-95141963
Fax: +61-2-95142332
www.transforming.cultures.uts.edu.au
http://research.hss.uts.edu.au/IndianOcean/

"A few hours’ mountain climbing turns a rogue and a saint into two  
roughly equal creatures. Weariness is the shortest path to equality  
and fraternity — and liberty is finally added by sleep." (Nietzsche)





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