Awards and achievements of the Department of Philosophy
Sonia Sikka has been awarded a Faculty Training Fellowship from the Shastri Indo-Canadian Institute
Professor Sonia Sikka from the Department of Philosophy has been awarded a Faculty Training Fellowship from the Shastri Indo-Canadian Institute, for a research stay in New Delhi from January to April, 2009. This fellowship is provided by the Shastri Institute’s “India Studies” program, whose purpose is to promote understanding of India in Canada.
Professor Sikka’s project is entitled: “Imagining who ‘we’ are: identity construction and the case of India”. It will examine three facets of the Indian situation: the role of colonial consciousness in the negotiation of a pan-Indian sense of “we”; the relation between Hindu and Muslim identities; and the struggle to develop a positive self-conception among Dalit communities. Professor Sikka plans to incorporate a study of these Indian cases into a wider theoretical work on the construction of sociocultural identities.