Dr Raphael Cohen Susewind

Teaching portfolio

At the Department of Methodology, I convene our MY421 introduction to qualitative methods and I co-convened MY400 research design. I also work on MY405 research design for policy and programme evaluation and supervise Master's dissertations on MY499. Much of the rest goes into doctoral methods training: on our MY580 short courses, in our Methods Surgeries, at the PhD Academy and across the ESRC Doctoral Training Partnership. For the latter I served as Development & Training Lead for its first three years, designing and implementing a new mentoring process built around holistic researcher development and aligned to the Vitae wheel, and representing us in a UK-wide network exchanging pedagogy and good practice on doctoral training.

At King's, I used to convene undergraduate modules on 'Social justice: Ethnographic perspectives' and 'Development issues in South Asia' and a postgraduate module on 'Advanced qualitative methods'; the syllabi below are kept as an archive. Current teaching is linked directly to the live course pages above, and LSE students can reach all Methodology course material on Moodle by self-enrolment.

• Social Justice
• South Asia
• Methods

Research

While my current role is focused on teaching and educational leadership, my take on methodology is based in over a decade of mixed-method and ethnographic research experience. I studied religious politics, the political economy of corruption, masculine aspirations and urban belonging in North India, building on ethnographic, statistical and spatial data generated in long-term fieldwork among the country's large and diverse Muslim population. Much of my ethnography was based in the city of Lucknow, often seen as a 'space with too much history' (as explored together with historians in a special issue of SAMAJ edited with Chris Taylor). I have also written research software and contributed to open data initiatives, and I curated a comprehensive public repository of statistics on religion and politics in India based on electoral data - still online, no longer updated.

While much work on religion and politics in India aims to understand Hindu-Muslim riots, engineered by politicians who exploit communal prejudice for electoral gain, and in the process tends to treat Muslim Indians as a monolithic block, my ethnographic research pays closer attention to religio-political dynamics within religious communities and asks how these intersect with growing aspirations for 'development'. My monograph on ambivalence and ambiguity in Gujarat for instance studied the production of peace (rather than violence) by showing how both developmentalist and faith-based activists link political protest to religious ideas and communal belonging in a post-conflict setting.

Through subsequent mixed method publications, I then revealed the fallibility of instrumental calculations in fluid religio-political contexts and demonstrated how Muslims' electoral choices mirror those of non-Muslims, varying across time and space in response to local demography and political history (with Raheel Dhattiwala). I intervened in the heated debate on Muslim 'ghettos' in Indian cities, arguing that these are not necessarily the straightforward product of communal violence - as has been assumed so far - but that financial and social pull factors equally contribute to residential clustering. To support this view, I demonstrated how a socially segmented bureaucracy structures the political economy of urban development and how certain kinds of local knowledge determine how built reality is perceived, navigated and marked as 'ghettoised' irrespective of actual degrees of segregation. Most recently I argued that iconic infrastructure can bring fragmented publics together against all odds - in part by interviewing a true ghost - and wrote about the looping micro-mobilities of young men who feel stuck, demonstrating how these can impact their sense of belonging just as much as long-distance migration.

From 2021 to 2024, I was Co-Investigator on a large network grant on 'Muslims in a time of Hindu majoritarianism' funded by the Henry Luce Foundation (PIs Christophe Jaffrelot and Bernard Haykel). I led the 'ghettoisation' cluster with six team members across India to further investigate Muslims' spatial politics through a multi-sited and digital ethnography of resistance, adaptation and co-option. A first special issue from this work (edited with Sudhir Selvaraj) on 'the rule(s) of law under Hindutva' appeared in Social & Legal Studies; in our own contribution, Fahad Zuberi and I argue that the legal crystallisation of Muslim ghettoisation rests simultaneously on de-politicising and on hyper-politicising law. A second special issue (edited with Christophe Jaffrelot) on Muslim Indians as Second Class Citizens appeared in Contemporary South Asia and a third special issue (edited with Shrey Kapoor) on the spatial politics of how 'communal capitalism' fuses neoliberal and majoritarian exclusion in the Hindu Rashtra is coming together in Antipode.

My overarching aim is to lift the study of Muslim South Asia, which has long been caught in ideological readings and a partition- or at least violence-centric perspective, to the same level of conceptual as well as, crucially, methodological sophistication that characterises the study of non-Muslim sociality. In the long run, studying how Muslim Indians navigate wider social change within the context of the world's largest secular democracy - though one sliding steadily into majoritarian rule - should also help to rebut persistent claims of Muslim exceptionalism in global academic as well as popular discourse.

• Gujarat
• Lucknow
• Data