Programmes
At HUL we understand our work as at once global and local. Careful attention to local specificity helps us build insights that can lead to teaching and learning(School), reflection (Khidki) and development of meaningful interventions, advocacy and archiving (Observatory). Our work is thematically centred around jobs and employment, learning and education and climate justice. These broad thematics are all anchored around three core values: openness, collaboration and entrepreneurship. While we are primarily located in Hyderabad and the broader region of the Deccan our outreach and networks are national and global in scope.
Urban Observatory is envisaged as a set of projects around
1. data repositories, archives and libraries;
2. research and advocacy
3. physical and social interventions around communities and places.
Each of these projects is to feed and support the other projects. For example, data repositories inform research and advocacy and enable designed interventions. LIkewise, interventions will lead to new research and new data.
Khidki is envisaged to grow into a broader platform for reflection, collaboration and engaging with diverse points of view on issues that matter to us most now. We hope to translate academic and intellectual insights into practical knowledge. We hope to shift the terms of debates. We value places and regions as crucibles in which material and social formations – nature and society shape each other into distinct combined forms. Khidki organises round tables and lectures, and publishes collaborative writing. Khidki is a window. It is a collection of perspectives, it has multiple vantage points. A group of engaged scholars give Khidki the autonomy that a venture of this kind needs from the parent organisation HUL.
HUL School is envisaged to grow into a learning platform around urbanisation in the global south. We understand this as a task of crafting a critical sensibility learning practical skills for a global future. We value experimenting with new forms of knowledge. We value everyday life of the majority of people who live in various conditions of vulnerabilities and bear the burden of history in many different forms. We have run three online courses on Pandemic and the Southern and three training programs in GIS and spatial thinking between November 2020 and May 2022. Students enrolled in these courses from Hyderabad itself and from other cities in India and overseas. We are looking forward to consolidating this experience.