Ashoka University launches The Centre for The Creative and The Critical
Centre to provide a space that encourages, discusses, and strengthens creative thinking and critical arguments
New Delhi: Ashoka University today announced the setting up of its new centre, The Centre for the Creative and the Critical. This Centre will provide a forum to raise and address questions around creative practice and critical argument.
The Centre aims to bring together novelists, poets, translators, artists, scholars, filmmakers, journalists and publishers who belong to different traditions and histories from all over the world to stimulate intercultural and extra-disciplinary discussions about creative practice. It intends to make itself a source for interventions in contemporary debates on varied subjects and develop a new vocabulary for these debates. It will build on partnerships with other institutions around the world.
Speaking at the launch of the Centre, Amit Chaudhuri, Professor of Creative Writing and Director, The Centre for the Creative and the Critical, Ashoka University said, “I am delighted to announce the inception of the Centre for the Creative and the Critical at Ashoka University. The Centre is meant to create a space for thinking about creative practice and critical concepts in a way that is no longer addressed by institutional and academic writing or by the language adopted by publishers, festivals, or the media. In other words, it arises from a genuine desire to depart from the way literature and creativity are discussed in the academy and in the public sphere.
He also added, “The Centre hopes to deepen the intervention created over the last seven years by the symposia in ‘literary activism’, of which Ashoka University has been the principal host since 2018; the website literaryactivism.com (also supported by the university); and publications like Literary Activism: Perspectives (Oxford University Press and Boiler House Press).”
Sharing her thoughts, Prof. Malabika Sarkar, Vice-Chancellor, Ashoka University said, “The Centre for the Creative and the Critical will provide a platform for creative practice and critical argument. We believe that it will emerge as an intellectual epicentre of contemporary literary, artistic and academic discourse that nurtures intercultural and extra-disciplinary discussions around creative practices.”
The Centre will organize seminars, symposia, and workshops by creative practitioners and thinkers so that they can share their views and thought-processes with students, each other, and in the public domain. International collaborative networks will be created in North America, the UK, Germany, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, China, building on already-existing partnerships for the symposia with TORCH and St Hugh’s College, Oxford, the Columbia Institute of Ideas and Imagination, Paris, and the India International Centre, Delhi.