Cricketers, Refugees and Resistance: A Critique of Media Representation in ICC 2023 ODI World Cup

Cricket lives in the lives of many people in South Asia. It is not just a sport, rather it is deeply embedded within the socio-economic and political repertoire of a country. According to Ashis Nandy, “cricket is an Indian game accidentally discovered by the British.” This statement recognizes that this sport has gone through tremendous transformations and transitions in order to achieve prime importance in the area of sports across the region. As a sport which constantly appeals to the collective consciousness of nations, it has been associated with the building of national identity. Unlike any other sport, cricket in the twenty first century embodies the growing power of South Asia in several ways. Sayan Kandar writes.

“Frontier Dreams: Afghanistan in the Bengali Literary Imagination” with Mou Banerjee

The Center for the Humanities of University of Wisconsin- Madison organized a virtual Friday lunch event titled, “Frontier Dreams: Afghanistan in the Bengali Literary Imagination” with Mou Banerjee. Banerjee, an Asst. Prof. in History at the UW-Madison, talked extensively on the history of Afghanistan during the British colonial rule of the Indian subcontinent, particularly from 1920s to 1940s. She pointed out the ways in which Afghanistan endured in Bengali imagination of that time, as opposed to in the British Colonial imagination. The discussion primarily revolved around the juxtaposition of the accounts of the landscape and history of Afghanistan through Syed Mujtaba Ali’s genre defyng work Deshe Bideshe (1948) or At Home and in Foreign Lands, against the occidental view of Afghanistan as a dangerous and ungovernable frontier. Tamoha Majumdar reports on the virtual event that was held on Friday, 4^th March, 2022.

Kolkata Declaration on the Need for a Coherent Protection Policy and Justice for Refugees and Migrants of Afghanistan, 2021

More than a hundred academics, jurists, activists, humanitarian functionaries, and media persons, gathered in Kolkata from twenty countries from all over the world in a workshop and conference on “Global Protection System for Refugee and Migrants”(organised by the Calcutta Research Group, November 15-20, 2021), issued on November 20, 2021 the following call on the community of nations, the UNHCR, all other human rights and international humanitarian agencies, and the IOM: to ensure the life, livelihood, dignity and right of passage of the people of Afghanistan.

Report: Panel Discussion on Teaching Migration in South Asia

The Mahanirban Calcutta Research Group (CRG), in association with the Institute of Human Sciences (IWM), Vienna, organised a two-day teachers’ workshop on ‘Research Methodology and Syllabus Making in Migration and Forced Migration Studies’, on 21st and 22nd December 2020. Digangana Das reports on the first public pre-workshop session titled ‘Teaching Migration in South Asia’, held virtually on the 20th of December 2020.