51²è¹Ý

Please join us for the final talk of the year in the Department of Sociology-Anthropology Colloquium. Our guest speaker is Prof. Erica Bornstein from the University of Oregon, USA. 

Professor Bornstein's talk will explore the issue of nonprofit regulation in India in relation to current global trends. Based on her recent book, A Revolution of Rules, she will discuss her research findings and the methodological challenges of studying regulatory processes ethnographically. 

Bio: Erica Bornstein is Professor of Anthropology at University of Oregon. Her research interests include economic development and philanthropy, non-governmental and nonprofit organizations, voluntary sector regulation, and humanitarianism. She is the author of three monographs: A Revolution of Rules: The Regulatory Reform of India’s Nonprofit Sector (Stanford 2025); Disquieting Gifts: Humanitarianism in New Delhi (Stanford 2012), and The Spirit of Development: Protestant NGOs, Morality, and Economics in Zimbabwe (Stanford 2005). She is also the coeditor of Forces of Compassion: Humanitarianism Between Ethics and Politics (School for Advanced Research Press, 2011).

Book abstract:

What is it about nonprofits that inspires so many to passionately support their agendas and others to adamantly seek their control? In India, laws regulating the nonprofit sector were dramatically reformed between 2010-2020, reconfiguring relationships between corporations, nonprofits, and the government. Thousands of nonprofits, including powerful NGOs, lost their ability to receive foreign funding, and in 2015 dozens more were put on a state-sponsored watch list. While many assume that nonprofits are defined by the causes they champion, A Revolution of Rules argues that the nonprofit form is shaped by its regulation, in a dynamic process of democratic and political negotiation. The scrutiny of nonprofits must be understood in the global context of political judicialization and regulatory reform, and the shrinking global stage for rights-based work.