Spinning Wheels and Summer Research
Anne Jones, now a second-year student in our MA program, earned a Summer Research Fellowship for the summer of 2020. These are competitive stipends in the amount of $3000 to support scholarly efforts conducted during June, July, and August. During a normal summer, recipients would often travel to archives relevant to their work. Of course, this has not been a normal summer! Anne shared some information and reflections about her project with the YAWP: M. K. Gandhi’s writings have been crucial to the ideologies that informed the Indian independence movement. In works like Hind Swaraj , he outlined his belief that political self-rule for India had to be bound with economic independence and civil disobedience. For Gandhi, these tenets materialized through the use of a crucial object: the charkha or spinning wheel. Spinning one’s own cotton/cloth, he argued, would mobilize India’s rural population and assist India’s economic independence by rejecting imported British cloth. What ...
