CISAR Newsletter: November 18, 2019
Announcement
Congratulations to Rudri Bhatt, who was awarded the Nehru Humanitarian Award for 2019.  Rudri Bhatt is an  interdisciplinary environmental engineering  Master's of Science student in IRES (put the full name). She is  interested in conducting research on improving air quality and promoting the transition to clean energy in India.
Upcoming CISAR Events
Ground Down by Growth: Tribe, Caste, Class and Inequality in 21st Century India   *Tomorrow*

Date:  November 19, 2019
Time: 5:00 PM - 6:30 PM
Location: C.K. Choi 120
Presenter: Alpa Shah
 
Alpa Shah presents her co-authored 'Ground Down by Growth: Tribe, Caste, Class and Inequality in 21st Century India', listed as a 2018 Book of the Year by The Hindu newspaper. While the world marvels at India's economic growth rates, inequality is rising and the country's 'untouchable' and 'tribal' communities - who make up a staggering one in twenty-five people across the globe - remain at the bottom of the economic and social hierarchy. How and why is this the case? In conversation with economists, a team of anthropologists lived with Adivasis ('tribes') and Dalits ('untouchables') in five different sites across India to answer this question. They show how capitalism is entrenching social difference, transforming traditional forms of identity-based discrimination into new mechanisms of exploitation and oppression. Inherited inequalities of power are merging with the super-exploitation of migrant labour, and the conjugated oppression of class, caste, tribe and gender. The struggles against these inequalities are considered.


Date: November 20, 2019
Time: 1:00 PM - 2:00 PM
Location: C.K. Choi 120
Presenter: Nusrat Chowdhury
Co-sponsored by: Department of Asian Studies and CISAR

In this talk, Nusrat S. Chowdhury discusses her new book, Paradoxes of the Popular: Crowd Politics in Bangladesh, in which she makes a compelling case for the crowd as a defining feature and a foundational force of democratic practices in South Asia. She ultimately argues that crowds are a true political pharmakon in the sense that they are both solutions and scapegoats in performances of popular politics. 

Date:  November 21, 2019
Time: 5 :00 PM - 6:30 PM
Location: Buchanan A, Room 202
Presenter: Harjant Gill
Co-sponsored by: Department of Asian Studies, UBC Asian Canadian & Asian Migration Studies, and CISAR.
 
What does it mean to be a successful man in Punjab today? Through on-going ethnographic research and filmmaker, Dr. Harjant Gill explores the various nuances of contemporary Punjabi masculinity. In a state increasingly transformed by globalization, becoming a transnational migrant is synonymous with becoming successful. Through interviews, documentary film, film and media analysis and written scholarship, Dr. Gill explores the transformations in gender relations, development of masculinities, and the role caste, class and transnational mobility plays in shaping everyday life in Punjab.

Date:  November 25, 2019
Time: 5 :00 PM - 6:30 PM
Location: C.K. Choi 120
Presenter: Mona Bhan
Co-sponsored by: Interdisciplinary Histories Research Cluster, UBC Himalaya Program, Science and Technology Studies, the Department of Anthropology, and CISAR. 
 
Dr. Mona Bhan, Associate Professor of Anthropology at Syracuse University, will be giving a talk that analyzes the relationship between dam building, border wars, and India's settler colonial politics in Kashmir, particularly in the aftermath of the removal of Articles 370 and 35A that maintained Kashmir's semi-autonomous status in the Indian union. Dr. Bhan will discuss how controlling vital Himalayan rivers fortifies Hindu reimaginings of Kashmiri territory while forcibly integrating the region into India's extractive economy.

Date:  November 28, 2019
Time: 5 :00 PM - 6:30 PM
Location: C.K. Choi 120
Presenter: Nikky-Guninder Kaur Singh
Co-sponsored by: Department of Asian Studies and CISAR
 
We celebrate Guru Nanak's 550th birthday by remembering his joyous aesthetics, with Professor Nikky-Guninder Kaur Singh of Colby College, renowned scholar of Sikhism, feminist approaches to the study of Sikh tradition, and Punjabi literature. Join us!

Opportunities

Date:  November 21, 2019
Time: 10:00 AM - 11:00 AM (PST)
Location: Online
Presenters: Charlotte Giles and Jonathan Loar
 
This webinar will be an introduction to the Library of Congress' South Asian Collection available through the Asian Reading Room. South Asian Librarians Charlotte Giles and Jonathan Loar will delve into South Asian materials in the Asian Division's General Collections, Rare Book Collection, Web Archiving Collections, Electronic Database Collections, and much more. This will also be an opportunity to share often overlooked, new, and newly digitized items that may be of use or interest to researchers on the region. We will follow up this webinar with a Q&A through the chat interface.
Call for Papers: Institute of Islamic Studies, McGill University

Symposium Date: March 26-27, 2020
Due Date: November 30, 2019
 
The organizing committee of the McGill Institute of Islamic Studies Graduate Student Symposium welcomes abstract submissions to their tenth annual symposium.  Our aim is to provide an opportunity for graduate students based in various parts of the world and approaching the study of Islamicate thought and life across time and space through a multiplicity of disciplinary and methodological approaches to share their work with the Institute's faculty and students in an atmosphere of constructive and supportive criticism. We are pleased to invite graduate students at all stages of research and dissertation-writing related to Islam and Islamicate communities anywhere in the world (East Asia, South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East) to submit proposals for individual paper presentations.  Reflecting our department's primary research areas, the symposium's themes include but are not limited to:
  • history, political science, and anthropology
  • theology, philosophy, mysticism, and jurisprudence
  • Urdu, Arabic, Persian, and Turkish literature
An abstract of 250-500 words and a one-page résumé should be sent electronically to miisscsymposium@gmail.com by November 30, 2019. Please include a tentative title for your paper and two or three keywords describing its regional and disciplinary focus, as well as your name, programme of study (MA, MPhil, or PhD), and departmental and institutional affiliation. Applicants will be notified of a decision by December 30, 2019. It may be possible to offer a limited number of grants (of not more than 200 CAD) to contribute towards participants' travel expenses. Please don't hesitate to reach out to us with any other queries.

Due Date: January 31, 2020 at 12:00 AM

Applications are now being accepted for the Asian Division's 2020 Florence Tan Moeson fellowship, open to undergraduate and graduate students, faculty at all levels, librarians, and independent scholars and researchers, to support a minimum of five business days of research in the Asian Reading Room of the Library of Congress (Washington, D.C.).
Join the Canadian South Asian Studies Association (CSASA)

South Asianists from across Canada gathered last June at UBC, and decided together to establish a national scholarly association for faculty actively researching and teaching on South Asia-Canada and graduate students enrolled in related Canadian M.A. and Ph.D. programmes, to be known as the Canadian South Asian Studies Association (CSASA) as a non-profit member affiliated with the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences. Ideally, we hope to have some kind of CSASA presence at the next Congress (2020), at Western University.

As a first step, all graduate students, faculty members, and researchers with research interests in South Asia are invited to join CSASA-L, a newly created listserv hosted at Athabasca University, where subscribers can share professionally relevant information related to teaching, research, resources, and events on South Asia-Canada. If you would like to join, please read the listserv rules and enter your subscription details.
For Students

Facilitators: Suyesha Dutta and Morgan Khan
Supervisor: Dr. Anne Murphy

Course Title: ASIA 476Z 001 and HIST 390A
When: Term 2
Days: Tuesday/Thursday
Time: 12:30 - 2:00pm
Room: IKB 191

Postcolonial and Subaltern Studies have been important in critiquing the nation and its citizens. These have also helped critique the nationalist project that drives the Indian state. In this course, we will critically read and compare approaches based on the changing nature of subaltern studies, socio-economic and socio-cultural identity formation, and the way dissent manifests itself in India. While there are a number of classes dealing with the history of pre-independence India, there is a marked absence of classes dealing with the history of India post-partition. Abandoning the narrative at this time of deep divide needs to be rectified, and thus allowing students to explore the history and politics that resulted from the scars rendered by the Partition. It also enables students to engage with, and garner a deeper understanding, of the long reaching effects of colonialism, as they play out in the modern history of a post-colonial geography. We hope that this class will fill the gap speaking to the modern history of the Indian subcontinent. 

Readings will draw on historiography, social theory, political economy, colonial and postcolonial studies, ethnography, and governance. Course material will be largely key secondary material although this will be supplemented with some primary material. The course is organised thematically rather than strictly chronologically, so that students will find it an advantage to have some awareness of the general history of colonial and post-colonial India. Evaluation will be based on class participation, a presentation of weekly readings (done once or twice through the semester), a final research project proposal (peer-graded), and its presentation thereafter. 

This course does not require a prerequisite, but requires a submission of an expression of interest. Please send a statement of interest in about 500 words to  identitydissent@gmail.com, briefly expressing your interest in the course and how you would be able to contribute to this seminar. The course is appropriate for students across every region and/or discipline.  

We've compiled a list of courses for Winter 2019/2020 with South Asia content. You can checkout the list  here.

If you're a UBC faculty member teaching a course with content pertaining to South Asia, feel free to contact us to list it on the CISAR website. 
2018-2019 Annual Report
Our 2018-2019 Annual Report is ready! Take a look at last year's events and activities, with special new highlights on South Asia-related programs across UBC -- and learn more about CISAR's work. 
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