The Global Revolution of Time in the Nineteenth Century

Fourth Max Weber Lecture
Speaker: Sebastian Conrad (Friedrich-Meinecke-Institut, FU Berlin)
30 January 2020, Goethe-Institut / Max Mueller Bhavan Kolkata

Organised by the Max Weber Stiftung India Branch Office in collaboration with the Consulate General of the Federal Republic of Germany, Jadavpur University and Goethe-Institut / Max Mueller Bhavan Kolkata.

The nineteenth century witnessed a fundamental transformation of notions of time on a global scale. Around the world, time-hallowed practices of time measurement and of time-related cosmologies had to come to terms with a new global regime. This new time regime constituted a four-fold revolution, introducing the concepts of standardization, of global synchronicity, of progressive time, and of deep historical time. In this talk, Sebastian Conrad argued that this temporal revolution cannot be equated with the diffusion of European temporality, but it needs to be understood as a multifaceted response to global challenges.

The talk scheduled to be held in New Delhi on 27 January had to be cancelled, due to the speaker falling ill.
Lecture Poster


The Politics of Humiliation: Historical Trajectories

Third Max Weber Lecture
Speaker: Ute Frevert (Max Planck Institute for Human Development)
22 November 2019, Jadunath Mu­seum and Resource Centre Kolkata and
25 November 2019, Goethe Institut New Delhi

The talk was about the power of public shaming and humiliation in the mod­ern world. Such strategies were either meant to punish and reintegrate a per­son, who had violated social norms, or to debase and stigmatize those whom others wanted to exclude from groups or society at large. The talk follows the development of such practices since the late eighteenth century in legal, education and foreign policies, mainly with regard to Europe, China, and India. It focused on the concept of human digni­ty and why this has become paramount.
Lecture Poster


Education and State Formation in Europe, East Asia and the USA

Second Max Weber Lecture
Speaker: Andy Green (Institute of Education of the University College London)   
22 February 2019, India International Centre New Delhi and
26 February 2019, TISS Naoroji Campus Mumbai

In this lecture, Andy Green discussed the social origins of mass education in the West, including the roles played by industrial and urban change, proletarianisation and liberalism, and how nation-building lay at the heart
of the creation of modern education. While human capital theories have focused on how schools and colleges supply the skills for economic growth, Green showed how the forming of citizens and national identities through education has often provided the necessary condition for both economic and social development.
Lecture Poster


Education and Urban Crises

First Max Weber Lecture
Speaker: Pauline Lipman (University of Illinois, Chicago) 
12 November 2018, National Institute of Advanced Studies (NIAS) Bengaluru
16 November 2018, India International Centre New Delhi

This paper argued that education is co-constitutive of the neoliberal economic-political order and its urban crises and is a critical site for resistance to neoliberalism, racism, reactionary nationalism, and xenophobia. She began with the stakes of the present moment: the conjuncture of profound economic, political, social, and ecological crises and global resurgence of xenophobic, white supremacist, nationalist, anti-democratic agendas, on one hand, and new resistances, solidarities, social imaginaries and emerging counter-hegemonic programs, on the other and traced this polarized moment to the protracted structural crisis of capitalism, globalized neoliberalism, and legacies of colonialism, white supremacy, xenophobia, and entrenched class/race/ gender/caste/ethnic/religious social hierarchies that variously permeate our societies at all scales.
Lecture Poster


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