Graduate Student Research Symposium 2020

Second-year MA student Anne Jones presented at the virtual Graduate Student Research Symposium last week, sharing her work from her Summer Research Fellowship. Here is the abstract for Anne's paper, entitled "Unraveling the Empire: The Spinning Wheel as an Actor in Gandhi’s Writings and the Imperial Network":

"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. Using the hermeneutics of Actor-Network Theory, my research traced how the spinning wheel gained anticolonial agency and created a network that connected the colony to the metropole. Scholarship on the nationalist movement and on the spinning wheel have largely ignored this materialist effect that played a role in the eventual deconstruction of the Empire. What we see, then, is how the enmeshing of Hind Swaraj (a text), the spinning wheel (an object), and a plethora of humans eventually contributed to not only the Indian independence—Gandhi’s original goal—but also the demise of the Lancashire textile industry by 1960."

You can find more details about the Graduate Student Research Symposium, and watch a video of Anne's presentation, at the Symposium's website: https://www1.villanova.edu/villanova/artsci/graduate/policies-and-resources/Graduate_Research_Symposium.html 

Congratulations, Anne!