India Blog Series: An Introduction

The India: Inside Out Project

APDS Blogger: Maya Babla

This December, a group of seven graduate students from the Master of Public Diplomacy program at USC’s Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism will embark on a journey to India. We will visit New Delhi and Mumbai, meeting with a range of stakeholders interested in how this global player is positioning itself to foreign and domestic audiences.

Our research will assess the role of each of these actors: public, private, and nonprofit, as well as media and academia—and seeks to understand how they create the public diplomacy ecosystem in India. We will survey a wide range of ‘diplomacies’—from cultural to economic to citizen-powered initiatives—to understand how each of these is contributing to communicating the idea of India. Along the way, we'll be reporting on our findings through the project’s website, India: Inside Out. The objective of the website is to spark a larger dialogue on the relevance and value of public diplomacy within the international affairs and communications communities, and we invite you to participate. 

As part of the team, I started the conversation last week by offering my own definition of public diplomacy. In the coming weeks, each of the members of the India: Inside Out team will be writing about our particular research areas before our trip, our impressions of India upon our arrival, and once we’ve delved in, our analysis of what that public diplomacy ecosystem looks like. See team member Jessica Castillo’s recent post, A Migration of People and Perceptions.