About
The Sikholars: Sikh Graduate Student Conference was born out of repeated conversations with graduate students about the need for a collaborative effort to bring various expertises together to identify, analyze, and support the needs for research about the Sikh community.
In the late 19th century and early 20th century, under the leadership the of celebrated African-American visionary, W.E.B. DuBois, an annual conference, called the “Atlanta Conferences” was held in the southern city. With little professional capital and even less finances, these series of conferences created the most extensive view of African-American life and are still used as an example of collected community resource potential today. In oOver a century later, the data, analysis, and viewpoints generated by these “working groups” areis celebrated as one of the most comprehensive examples of a non-state group cooperating to better understand the needs and concerns of their own constituency. The resources and professional capital of the Sikh American community in 2009 isare far greater than it was forthose of African-Americans in 1899.
With the burgeoning of the Sikh community in the United States, many young Sikhs have attained high levels of education, far surpassing the national average. In fact, the educational levels of the Sikhs in the United States per capita are possibly the highest in the entire diaspora. In order to begin capitalizing on this educational investment, it is incumbent [R1] to create channels to engage in these rising professionals and foster a Sikh sentimentconsciousness.
Informal professional associations have already been founded within the Sikh community, but are mainly confined to networking. Academic conferences, related to Sikh Studies already occur, but the ideas put forth are generally confined to a narrow group audience [R2] that engage in these issues, but are not necessarily linked or concerned with the Sikh community’s general welfare. The Sikh Graduate Students Conference does not aim to replicate these efforts, but rather to create a truly innovate and imaginative conference. By bringing together promising students in a truly multi-disciplinary fashion, we seek to incubate further promising research, not merely for publication purposes, but for actual implementation. The conference will create “working groups” on specific issues with the an emphasis on creating, presenting, and promoting Sikh-related research.
