The Writing Urban India collective is pleased to launch a third round of writing Fellowships for up to twenty India-based early-career scholars, funded by the Urban Studies Foundation. This round of the scheme will be hosted by the National Law School of India University, Bangalore (NLSIU), and offers mentoring and financial support towards nurturing early-career scholars in writing and publishing on urbanisation in India. The Fellowships aim to enable candidates with the skills and knowledge required to produce a structured writing output that is academic in nature, and will be structured around a twelve month programme of capacity-building workshops, seminars, and one-to-one mentorship.
The call is open to urban practitioners, PhD students, and early-career academics with a focus on urban studies.
Applicants are now invited to submit their proposals, comprising a CV and a report on the status of any empirical data archive they seek to write from (if any). The selection committee will shortlist applicants whose drafts demonstrate a coherent argument and reasonable grasp of the empirical significance, contributions, and theoretical connections to urban studies.
The selection committee will interview shortlisted candidates, and based on the selection committee report, a jury will select a final list of Fellows who will receive the mentorship and financial support to attend these workshops over the coming year. Overall, the motivation to work hard within the period, the quality of the submitted draft, the diversity of topics, and the contribution to urban studies debates in India and globally will be significant criteria for selection. The collective will continue to use a selection method that privileges Diversity, Equality, and Inclusion.
To learn more about the project, and to apply, please visit the WUI website.
Origins of Writing Urban India
Writing Urban India emerged through a series of conversations among urban scholars located in diverse institutional settings across India about common concerns and motivations about the state of urban research in India. Given the unevenness in our universities and a range of institutional and structural barriers, younger PhD scholars do not always feel confident enough to put their work out in the public domain. Or if they do, they are sometimes not equipped to negotiate with the forms of gatekeeping that govern academic publishing. WUI emerged out of this collective concern to challenge some of these hierarchies by creating networks of solidarity both among junior scholars and between junior and senior scholars. WUI was imagined as a writing support group that would work with them to develop first drafts for journal articles with both monetary support and mentoring.
Between November 2020 and July 2023, the Centre for Policy Research (CPR) anchored two rounds of writing support programmes WUI 1.0 and 2.0, fully supported by the Urban Studies Foundation. Both programmes made a considerable impact, with Fellows successfully developing their publications (and sometimes winning awards!). The third round of the scheme has built upon learnings from these earlier activities, which were structured into three parallel tracks: mentorship, online community building, and workshops. In addition to one-to-one mentoring, the WUI Team was able to work with the students to create an online peer community where students themselves organised “Coffee Hour” periodically as an online support group to share ideas, work together, and share tips on academic writing with each other. The Fellows also started a silent writing group in July to stay motivated and provide support and friendly pressure while committing to writing.
Earlier rounds of the initiative demonstrated that whilst the monetary support and one-to-one writing mentorship provided by the scheme are crucial, PhD candidates in India were also much more in need of a space where they can find different kinds of relationships with peers, mentors, and role models through which they can consistently find encouragement, guidance and motivation. Therefore, the third round of the initiative will now offer a more generalised kind of mentorship through in-person meetings that can set up bi-lateral online interactions with mentors and monthly online cohort meetings. In addition, two 5-day in-person workshops will be held at the beginning and end of the programme. These will be structured around masterclasses, presentations, and in-depth feedback sessions. The collective has also learnt from experience that bridging structural inequalities ultimately requires a longer engagement, well beyond the scope of a year-long Fellowship. Therefore, the collective will now introduce a qualitative mapping of candidates to get a sense of the distance covered during the Fellowship rather than a purely quantitative understanding of the number of papers produced.
To learn more about the project, and to apply, please visit the WUI website.