CFP - Globalisation and emergence of the World Wide Web (www) are the two crucial movements that have brought unprecedented changes in higher academics by undermining the importance of physical and political boundaries in restricting access to knowledge, information and scholarly resources. This, in turn has led to an exponential rise in importance of English as the language of communication while facilitating the preservation, archiving and dissemination of both past and vernacular texts through the tools of ICT and more importantly, digitisation. Some of the key developments through these technological interventions have been in areas such as setting up of digital humanities laboratories to study the previously unmapped societies and cultures or dying civilizations, providing synchronous education to students in distant and even overseas classrooms using videoconferencing and web-conferencing, setting up collaborative research centres across continents and across disciplines, establishing more and more open source libraries and other kinds of educational resources and many more.

Internationalism in higher education has become the buzzword in the universities and their latest concern. Though the possibilities for academic expansion in this new ecology seem exciting, there should also be adequate awareness of challenges that may result from exposing established educational system to forces that are often beyond the control of the academic institutions only.

In spite of their global nature, there has been disparity in the changes brought about by these two processes in separate geographies, arising from heterogeneous political conditions, domestic education policies, economic stability, ideological, cultural and even religious beliefs and practices across countries and cultures. Every region therefore requires unique strategies of adaptation and sustainable models in order to meaningfully survive and contribute to regional development and global scholarship.

These global agents of change have made their presence felt in South Asia. But the unique heterogeneity of the region in terms of its culture, topography, socio-economic/political situations, religious and ethnic diversities have also led to great diversity in the structure, policy and ideology of organized higher academic sector of this region. Such heterogeneity demands a profound understanding of the region’s unique requirements, while formulating a discourse on modern South Asian academic practices. As a part of this milieu, and stakeholders we strongly feel a need to contribute to the emerging roadmap on organized academic practices in this part of the world.

In the proposed webinar we would like to delve into the issues pertaining to these changes occurring in the academic ecology and explore the strategies of adaptation taken or that can be taken. We would also like to look into the disparities and their long term impact on South Asian scholarship. Such a study has the potential to make meaningful contribution in the field of social sciences by mapping the means, extent, and type of knowledge sharing and preservation as well as research - the three key aspects of higher academics.

The sub-themes of the conference are as follows:
1. Digitization and its impact on higher academics
2. Archiving, preservation, dissemination of vernacular texts – practice and politics
3. Heterogeneity in South Asia and its effect upon academics
4. New academic ecology in post globalization era, its variables and strategies of adaptability

Medium of presentation : Bengali/English only

Papers are invited on but not restricted to the following topics:
1. Does technology ensure greater dissemination of education and level disparities?
2. What is the future of higher academics in this rapidly changing global scenario?
3. What could be the probable roles of educators and the modes of upgradation/ training/ orientation required?
4. The role of digitization in preservation of anthropological/ literary/ sociological and other aspects of societies
5. ICT enabled classrooms and their dynamics
6. Academic ecology, policies, funding etc. and the induction of modern technologies
7. Technology and the empowering of the margins
8. Humanities and Social Sciences and technologically driven education
9. Access to e-resources, open access resource system and its effects