SWEDISH SOUTH ASIAN STUDIES NETWORK

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Visit to the Department of Communication and Journalism (DCJ), University of Kerala, Friday, November 9, 2007

Web page: http://www.keralauniversity.edu/universitydepartments.htm#kfx

Anna Lindberg with two second year students at the Department of Communication and Journalism, Rajitha Joy and Vandana Mohandas.

After an excellent lunch at the Loyola College campus restaurant, we travelled to the University of Kerala’s Kariavattam Campus. Here the Department of Communication and Journalism (DCJ) is located in a building that also houses the Dept. of Botany (manifesting itself in a surrounding lush wonderful park). Our contact person, Dr. K. Subash, Head of the department, had come to the university just in order to meet us. Since it was the day after Diwali, he was otherwise off from work.

The department is involved in a Linnaeus-Palme project in conjunction with the Dept. of Media and Communication Studies, Karlstad University. Two Swedish professors will come to the DCJ in the early spring and two professors from this department will go to Karlstad College in April 2008. This is the third year this kind of exchange has been going on between Karlstad and Kerala University.

Although Dr. Subash (photo to the left) was already quite familiar with SASNET (he regularly receives the SASNET newsletters), he was interested in learning more, so we outlined the past, present, and future activities of the organisation.

Dr. Subash showed us around their media lab and library. They carry out very advanced work. The department admit about 20 Masters students every year from a pool of 400–500 applicants, all of whom must take a test. There are only three Ph.D. students at present. The reason, according to Dr. Subash, is that most students get jobs in their field after receiving their Masters. For one thing, he noted, Kerala is second only to Japan in having the greatest number of newspapers in Asia. However, many of the students from DCJ work in other parts of India or abroad.