Recently Launched Sahapedia UNESCO Fellowship Encourages Research on India’s Cultural Heritage

• Sahapedia has recently launched a fellowship program in collaboration with UNESCO
• Applications are available in two variants – the Sahapedia Project Fellowship and the Sahapedia Research Fellowship
• The Executive Director of Sahaepedia has high expectations from this fellowship

New Delhi, July 16, 2017: Sahapedia is an open resource available online on Indian arts and has recently introduced a fellowship program with UNESCO as its partner to inspire, motivate and grant an opportunity to youngsters to widen their knowledge along with promoting documentation of rich cultural heritage of India.

The Sahapedia UNESCO fellowships are accessible by postgraduates, doctoral candidates, postdoctoral scholars, and graduates including the ones who are going to graduate in summer 2017. It awaits the generation of engaging and critically researched content in multimedia formats to be displayed on the website of Sahapedia.

Applications for the 2017 fellowships have commenced and are available in two forms – the Sahapedia Project Fellowship (SPF) and the Sahapedia Research Fellowship (SRF), which gives a choice to an applicant to participate at the primary documentation level or the process of content curation.

The deadline for applying for 100 fellowships available (20 SPF and 80 SRF) is July 15 for the year 2017.

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The SPF project is expected to have a duration of 12 weeks as compared to 8 weeks for SRF assignment. Applicants elected as Sahapedia Project Fellows will receive an amount of 40,000 Rupees, and Sahapedia Research Fellows will be granted an amount of Rs. 15,000.

Sahapedia's Executive Director, Sudha Gopalakrishnan, said she is looking forward to this fellowship and is anticipating that the research will enhance both the quality and volume of resources available on Sahapedia's website.

"It is a privilege to have the support of an organization like UNESCO for our documentation and conservation efforts. The aim of Sahapedia is to ensure that we are able to preserve in digital form and make freely accessible as much of the vast and diverse body of cultural knowledge in India as possible, especially about the lesser known practices and traditions in India", she said. "We would look forward to talented and committed young people to take advantage of the fellowships and contribute to the body of research work on Indian culture."

The Sahapedia UNESCO fellowship is a building block in achieving the aims of the UNESCO 2003 convention that highlight the "importance of the intangible cultural heritage as a mainspring of cultural diversity and a guarantee of sustainable development." UNESCO anticipates the proposal to help expand the number of professionals who want to work in this sector and assist them to engage with practices which are not widely known, community knowledge, and oral histories; the research work could widen unfamiliar areas to dig in.

Moe Chiba, Section Chief and Programme Specialist for Culture, UNESCO, said, "As the researchers are expected to look critically into the Representative List of Intangible Cultural Heritage of India, it will offer new perspectives with regard to the representation of the cultural diversity of India."

"The fellowship will not only help to generate new content on culture/heritage and disseminate it through the online platform Sahapedia, but it also provides a good opportunity to young researchers from different regions in India to engage with culture/heritage issues," said Vaibhav Chauhan, Sahapedia's Director.

– prepared by Harsimran Kaur of NewsGram. Twitter @Hkaur1025