Reclaiming Social Sciences and Humanities: Notes from South Asia
SASANKA PERERA- Keynote address delivered at the 4th Annual Research Symposium of National Centre for Advanced Studies (NCAS) in Social Sciences and Humanities, Colombo, Sri Lanka on December 20th 2017. I acknowledge the substantial contributions of my colleague, Dev Nath Pathak at South Asian University in formulating this text.
Let me begin by thanking Prof P.S.M. Gunaratne for inviting me to deliver this keynote address. Interestingly however, despite being a Sri Lankan university insider for nearly twenty years as a teacher, I was never part of the layers of operations at UGC with which National Centre for Advanced Studies (NCAS) is affiliated. As a result, I was never privy to the intrigues of UGC. I am still an outsider to this system, and now to the country’s university system as well.
