The Centre for Community Knowledge (CCK) has been planned as a premier institutional platform in India in interdisciplinary areas of Social Sciences, to link academic research and teaching with dispersed work on Community Knowledge.
At a time when development is faced with multiple challenges, the Centre for Community Knowledge aims to document, study and disseminate the praxis of community knowledge, so as to improve our understandings of our living heritage, and integrate community-based knowledge in the available alternatives. Drawn from living experience, and mostly unwritten, oral and practice based, community knowledge can play a crucial role in these transformative times in a number of areas, including the empowerment of marginal communities, adapting to environmental impacts and changes in public policy.
What we do
The Centre for Community Knowledge at Ambedkar University, Delhi is a university based Interdisciplinary Research Centre engaged in expanding and including new sources, practices and discourse in accommodating for our knowledge diversity. In this way, it is trying to bring oral and community knowledge into the academic knowledge mainstream.
As an Ethnological Research and Documentation Centre, it has initiated programmes, both urban and rural, that develop people centered narratives of knowledge and history and cultural transformations. For example, the Delhi Citizen Memory Project involves students, faculty and local partners in researching and documenting the history and diversity of the residents of the expanding mega city, as opposed the narrative of Delhi 'the Capital'. Similarly, working with the North East Forum at the University, the Centre undertakes field research in the NE region, with special reference to cultural knowledge heritage, material cultures and cultural transformation in the face of dramatic changes in the region over the last half century.
The Centre for Community Knowledge is also an Archiving Centre for community knowledge, and is engaged in creating digital archives of community knowledge, obtained both from ethnological and anthropological researchers, community organisations and self initiated.
We work with cultural and scientific research institutions like the Anthropological Survey of India, Indian Museum, National Museum, Indian National Science Academy and others. By bringing together community knowledge holders with scholars and cultural administrators, the Centre is working towards developing an interdisciplinary reassessment of our cultural pasts, through the reexamination of museum holdings that expand the sources of knowledge by bring community knowledge into the knowledge mainstream.