
Research at the Max Weber Forum for South Asian Studies (MWF) examines knowledge cultures in South Asia, focusing on education, knowledge and the economy, and knowledge production, circulation, and medialization, while remaining open to broader initiatives.
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Knowledge has shaped everyday life in South Asia—as family, caste, or class-bound practices, or as tools for mobility. Strategies of secrecy, certification, or open propagation reflected social norms and determined which knowledges gained value.
MWF research treats knowledge broadly, balancing formal institutions with learning-by-doing (jugaad), and placing elite reproduction alongside bottom-up practices. It explores how South Asian states, communities, and capital define desirable knowledge, emphasizing the interplay of social aspiration, political contestation, and everyday practice.

Education and Learning
The focus area aims to push the boundaries of education research in South Asia by trying to identify the politics around the shaping of the discourses of ‘education’ and ‘learning’. The focus area intends to break away from the already carved out boundaries of the field and bring it in conversation with other fields of research.
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It is with this kind of a vision that the Education and the Urban research group was formed and it shaped the focus area in its initial days. The research group’s fundamental enquiry was based on the observation that while education studies and urban studies have flourished as separate areas, they have hardly crossed paths to seek answers to questions like how urban transformations impacted the experiences of learning and education. The researchers currently associated with the focus area started off as part of the research group and they now pursue their individual projects that have helped to expand the scope of the core questions. The research projects emphasise that it is crucial to move beyond the history of education policies and the sociology of classroom participation to critically examine the field of education. They also aim to foreground the role of infrastructure, space, technologies and markets to delve deeper into the most fundamental question addressed by education scholars – the question of structural inequalities. And in doing so, the focus area also intends to reflect on the making of the fields of history and sociology of education in postcolonial South Asia. The historical projects include research on history pedagogy and the contested field of public history. The projects grounded in sociology of education engage with the various meanings of ‘crisis’ in the domain of education in contemporary times.

Economy and Knowledge
On hearing the term ‘market’, people’s associations range across a number of different ideas and images—of squares (more or less) packed with stalls selling goods; of notions delineating an abstract entity that quasi-naturally matches supply and demand and fixes prices; of fears that this less-than-tangible entity emerges as a threat, disrupting individual livelihoods or entire societies.
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What people rarely consider is the sheer amount of imaginative, interpretive, regulatory, and communicative labour that is constantly exercised, building on centuries-long histories, in order to make the seemingly simple act of exchange possible and to make markets work. The Economy and Knowledge focus area approaches economic subjects primarily by placing markets centerstage, and interprets markets, above all else, as informational orders and arenas for social communication. An area of particular interest for the researchers associated with the focus area is thus related to questions of protention, i.e. the anticipation of future events and occurrences that determine courses of economic behaviour and rely on the individual and collective translation of experiential memories into expectational projections. While protention is a key characteristic of all economic behaviour, it takes on particular importance in markets and economic conduct that have a strong future-orientation—for instance, debt/credit, insurance and assurance, gambling and speculation, prospection, marketing and market surveillance. In turn, the researchers study study the prominent attempts by societies across history to produce ways and means of making future uncertainty more manageable, such as reputational economies of obligation, regulatory regimes, contractual law, structures of arbitration, and the construction and conceptualisation of property. The focus area delves into the ambiguities across historical periods that arose from clashes between diverging market grammars brought into contact by ideational flows, commercial encounters, or politico-military expansion. South Asian and Indian Ocean modern and early-modern history and anthropology provide a rich field of inquiry especially in this area.

Knowledge Production, Circulation and Medialisation
The focus area studies the structures and processes of the production and circulation of knowledge about technologies of production, spawning periods from late colonialism to neoliberal capitalism. The circulation of knowledge in the different contexts scrutinised by the researchers go beyond the usual focus on the structures and processes of exchange between Europe and Asia, to highlight the importance of circulation between South Asia and East Asia (India and Japan in the context of rice cultivation technologies, and Bangladesh and South Korea in that of export garment production).
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Following the line of enquiry of the focus area, they explore the production and circulation of various forms of knowledge from the bottom-up. For example, by farmers adapting to and/or contesting rice cultivation technologies and varieties of cotton, and by men and women workers acquiring new technological skills and building political networks to survive in Bangladesh’s export-oriented garment industry. Although firmly grounded in their respective disciplines and methodologies of history and anthropology, in their investigations the researchers combine historiographic and ethnographic approaches each in their own way. The historian Sujeet George examines the scientific explorations and the exchange of expertise on different kinds of cotton in western India in late colonial times, as well as on different technologies of rice cultivation in the Nehruvian era. He also traces the development of ecology as a scientific discipline in independent India, its institutional set-up, and the life histories of involved scientists. Similarly, anthropologist Christian Strümpell, in his work on the export of ready-made garments in Bangladesh, focus on the profound transformation the industry recently underwent, the production and circulation of different kinds of knowledge that drive this change, and those this change at the same time provokes: knowledge about technological processes, the organisation of production, local labour management practices as well as global markets.

