SWEDISH SOUTH ASIAN STUDIES NETWORK

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University of Peradeniya, Sri Lanka:

Meeeting at the Department of Geography

We were hosted by Prof. (Mrs.) Anoja Wickramasinghe. We had one meeting with her and two colleagues in the afternoon, and then a second round of meetings on the following day, after reading the papers and articles that they gave us.

We gave a short presentation of SASNET and its Website.

Anoja Wickramasinghe is a specialist on Forestry and has a lot of international contacts in Holland, Canada, etc. She also moves in a regional network with Bina Aggarwal and Vandana Shiva in India. She studied in Sheffield for her PhD. She was funded by the British Council for a study of gender and land issues in Sri Lanka, India, Nepal and Bangladesh and came out with an anthology from that project. Among others Dr. Saxena worked in this project. She also co-operated with the Embassy of the Netherlands in projects, as well as with the University of Wales in Bangor.

Her department has one computer connected to the Internet, but the connection does not work. The set up is just a few weeks old. So she and others are working on the Internet from their homes, where they have all the equipment.

She has proposed a project on “Gender, Food Security and Local Environment” to SASNET but had no Swedish partner. The idea is to use the Rio plus 10 programme and research into the practice of Agenda 21 in local communities. How is the local environment and local agenda implemented. The project should also take up the diversity problem and underdevelopment. Important dimensions in this analysis is food security and gender. The same countries as in the previous project should be involved.

We also met Mrs. Chulani Rambukwella who is a senior lecturer in archaeology at this university. She has a proposal for a PhD project called “The Evolution of the Early Human Settlements in the Middle Mahaweli River Basin: The Archaeological Landscape of the Lower Mountain Region of Sri Lanka.”

Finally, we met Mrs. Rose Rupasinghe Samuel, Extension and Communication Centre, Department of Agriculture, Peradeniya. She has passed MSc. in Management of Agricultural Knowledge Systems at Wageningen Agricultural University, The Netherlands. Thesis title is:
“Agricultural Extension and Entrepreneurship. A Focus on the performance of the rural women.” She was supervised by a professor in Gender studies, but that professorship has now been cancelled after the retirement of the old professor.

Both Rambukwella and Samuel want to pursue their PhD studies in Sweden if opportunities arise.

Meeting with the staff of the Department of Sociology, Peradeniya

We were hosted by prof. M.W. Amarasiri de Silva, head of the department. There were 9 staff members in the meeting. Total staff is 21 and they have about 1 000 students in a year. They teach:

- Development sociology
- Gender studies
- Sri Lanka sociology
- Medical sociology and anthropology
- Reproductive health, etc.

They have two computers connected to the Internet server at the University, but the connection is slower than that via telephone lines in their homes.
We gave a short presentation of SASNET and its Web site.

Prof. Silva has applied to Sida for funds for a research programme on “War and Peace – social reconstruction” which will also involve geography and political science. The plan is to involve the University of Jaffna and the Eastern University at Vantharumoolai, Chenkalady (north of Batticaloa).

Another colleague, Dr. H M D R Herath knows Jan Lundqvist at Linköping University, and is interested in cultural ecology and ethnobotany.

A third colleague, Mr. Shanti Nandana Wijesinghe, would like to do his PhD in medical sociology in Sweden. We advised him to try in various places.