Volume 12, Number 5, 2020 I Full Text PDF
DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v12n5.rioc1s0n1
The Rupkatha International Open Conference 2020 is the first international conference that was organized by the Rupkatha journal initiative. It is the first open-access conference organized by a Scopus indexed journal in the Humanities in India, and indicates a logical trajectory to Rupkatha’s growing outreach in India and South Asia and indeed all over the world. The RIOC was also organized as a collaborative event with academic support of Dr. Priyanka Tripathy of IIT, Patna and Dr. Swayam Prabha Satpathy of the Sikhsha and Anusandhan University, Bhubaneswar. We should acknowledge that the collaborative help of the IIT Patna and Sikhsha and Anusandhan have contributed to give a new dimension to the event. The most significant achievement of the Rupkatha initiative has been the participation of hundreds, if not thousands of academicians, academic aspirants and doctoral or graduate and postgraduate level students from worldwide each one of them bringing in their fresh perspectives into the event, responding to the Call for Papers by writing, reflecting and involving a transition across interdisciplinary textuality of the arts, cultures, humanities issues, politics and the environment nto the debate which nuanced and leveraged both cotinuig and fresh ideas in the academy today. The faculty from IIT Patna and Sikhsha o Anusandhan, along with lesser involvement of faculty from various institutions and Universities all over the world, contributed to the humongous task of the management of responses to the Call for Papers and then reviewing and selecting every possible presentation after critical inquiry and observations throught that are required aspects of any good blind peer review system.
The editors of Rupkatha and the reviewers on the Rupkatha board made it possible to complete the peer review process of close to two thousand extended paper proposals within an incredibly short period of time. The entire process was of course completed in the context of a rigorous online system that was also partially mandated by the restrictions imposed onour movements and interactivity that resulted from the penetration of the novel Corona virus and the worldwide pandemia that interrupted movement, forced people to work from their individual niches, cope with the stress of different and often-extraordinary environments of work and life. Yet, under the funding resources of Rupkatha, which is a essentially a free and open access provider, the collective social effort formed a perfect example of how the large community of academicians, students, social scientists and authors came together to synchronize efforts for hosting the three day international webinar. The fees collected for defraying expenses of platform charges and open-access web hosting of the conference has created the great financial opportunity which could be exploited to conduct the proceedings of the conference in a smooth and extremely professional manner and without any slightest glitch within the entire three day period of transmission involving participation and reception of the high tech Zoom powered webinar that went streaming from the geodesic of the Eastern part of India out across the whole world with its different time-zones. The Rupkatha webinar, hosted with the distributed entanglement of an extraordinarily large community of scholars in different geodesics afforded a most remarkable experience in communication across space and time. The process suggests in what future directions satellite mediated communication is likely to affect a discussion on a global or interterrestrial space and the possibilities already inherent within that system, the breaking of frontiers of time, the collusion of space, the ability to converge on expedient foci by people who are interested in similar issues in different affordances.
The Proceedings have been published on the 17th of October 2020 and launched again on a transnational scale with an event that befittingly seeks to mark the transition of Rupkatha as a conference portal, just as much as a online open-access journal. After a decade long experience of peer-reviewed publication Rupkatha has now successfully implemented rapid issue based conference proceedings publication, maintaining its mission of independent reviews and an elevated quality of academic research. The deliberations of speakers in the inaugural event has demonstrated the possibility of hosting the most important intellectual thinkers in the academy; their willingness to join the Rupkatha movement impels that specific community to sensitise itself around a context like that of Covid. There is no doubt in our minds that the quarantine imposed by Covid does not stand as an intermission. Abdul JanMohamed’s path-breaking inaugural speech has sensitised the post-Covid academia with the death threat that is always unconsciously imposed over an underpriviledged minority in every part of the world. The walls of segregation that separate individuals from individuals needed to be broken down, first intellectually and then physically. The wall contitutes the major persuasive symbolism of inequity in the contemporary world. The fearlessness and vision of the human being contra death, disease, slavery and war, in a world which is cowered by death remains the abiding message of the RIOC 2020. An additional feature of this great conference was the inclusion of the social sciences within the spectrum of the conference. Social science perspectives on the social dimensions of the contemporary world has provided this bridge for the humanities in the Rupkatha conference. Few events have actually succeeded in associating social science and language analysis to the humanistic objectives that are at the core of literary and cultural studies. The only way in which the humanist ethics continues to influence the academy is to show, somewhat in the sense of the early Cartesians of the sixteenth century, that the human interest defines any kind of investigation into the psyche and its evolving character in the collective consciousness that is affecting us. I wish to thank each and all for the collaborative effort which yielded the best fruits of the RIOC 2020 and the publications of the proceedings. The success of the effort shall be carried over to future events of Rupkatha.I end with a perorative call for any similar future discourse and Rupkatha’s promise to organize people around these interests.
Tirtha Prasad Mukhopadhyay & Tarun Tapas Mukherjee