The Centre for Community Knowledge (CCK) is a University based Interdisciplinary Research Centre aimed at studying living communities and their diverse cultural knowledge. With a focus on communities at the ‘margins’, the Centre links community-led documentation of cultural heritage with scholarly rigour of analysis and research, in a public, transparent and collaborative way.
CCK fosters a reciprocal dialogue between knowledge from the margins and the mainstream, in the absence of which knowledge and cultural identity unique to local communities will continue to be ignored. The Centre adds to the corpus of academic knowledge from an interdisciplinary perspective, with regard to oral and local community knowledge and learning. This is carried out through field based research that contributes to bridging the gap between formal (codified) and oral (uncodified) knowledge.
The Centre aims to document, study, and disseminate the praxis of community knowledge, to improve the various understandngs of our living heritage, and integrate community-based knowledge to the available alternatives for sustainable futures. Working in partnership with academic and local individuals and organisations, the Centre's activities aim to create access to cultural and intellectual resources that enlarge the vision of what it means to be human and offering wisdom and experience that foster respect for difference, empower the disenfranchised and promote social justice and ecological sustainability.
What we do:
The Centre for Community Knowledge at Ambedkar University Delhi is 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, history and cultural transformations.
The Memories of Delhi 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 to the narrative of Delhi 'the Capital'. Similarly, working with the North East Forum at the University, the Centre undertakes field research in the Northeast region of India, 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. 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.
CCK works with cultural and scientific research institutions from India and elsewhere, like the Anthropological Survey of India, Indian Museum, National Museum, Indian National Science Academy, Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage(INTACH), Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts (IGNCA) and international institutions like the International Institute of Asian Studies(IIAS), Leiden University, the University of Texas at Austin, USA and others.
To know more about our work, visit our other websites at -
http://www.aud.ac.in/academic/centres/cck
http://www.cckonline.in/
http://www.maritimearchives-cck.org