Title: India’s Globalization: A Political Economy Perspective
Lecturer: Manjunath Pendakur (Professor, Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts and Letters at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton, Florida)
Chairperson: WU Changchang (Associate Professor, Department of Communication, East China Normal University)
Date: 1 pm, June 29th, 2017 (Thursday)
Venue: Room 5303, Building of School of Humanities, Minhang Campus, ECNU
Sponsor: Si-mian Institute for Advanced Studies in Humanities, ECNU
Abstract of the Lecture:
India made a historic shift in its economic policy starting in 1991 from an earlier socialist path by embracing neoliberalism, which has led to intense integration with the global economy. Much has changed in all fronts of public and private life of India’s citizenry while thegulf between the rich and the poor has widened. This lecture will explore the consequential changes at the level by examining social/media relations at the level of a small town. By employing political economy and ethnography, Iwill examine the effects of globalization on rural culture and how its very foundations may be changing forever.
Brief Introduction of the Lecturer:
Manjunath Pendakur specializes in the political economy of the media addressing a broad range of cultural issues by authoring a number of books and articles on Canada, India, and the USA. He is currently doing research on globalization and rural culture in India for which he combines political economy with ethnography. Pendakur has significant institution-building experience. He chaired the Department of Radio-TV-Film at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois and was appointed as the founding dean of the Faculty of Information and Media Studies at the University of Western Ontario, Canada in 1998. He assumed the deanship of the College of Mass Communication and Media Arts at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, Illinois in 2001. After seven years there, he became the Dean of Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts and Letters at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton, Florida. His honors and awards include an endowed professorship at Northwestern University, research grants from the Rockefeller Foundation & the Social Science Research Council, Ford Foundation, and John and Catherine T. McArthur Foundation and the Dallas W. Smythe Award from the Union for Democratic Communications.