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CISAR Newsletter: September 17, 2019
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Date: September 19, 2019
Time: 4
:00 PM - 5:30 PM
Location: C.K. Choi Room 226
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Date: September 19, 2019
Time: 5:30 PM - 7:00 PM
Location: C.K. Choi Room 120
Presenter: Sam Sonntag
Organized by the UBC Himalaya Program, with CISAR co-sponsorship.
In this retrospective of her research in Nepal, North India and Northeast India, Dr. Sam Sonntag considers the relationship between language politics and language policy. Her research in North India in the early 1990s contrasted the politics surrounding the status of Urdu in Bihar and Uttar Pradesh. She argued that in the 1980s differences in the consolidation of political power between the two states explained why granting Urdu official status was less controversial in Bihar than in Uttar Pradesh. Her focus was on the politics of language policy-making or what she calls the politics of governing languages. Dr. Sonntag also conducted fieldwork in Nepal during the same research stint, in the aftermath of the people's movement that ended absolute monarchy. She explored the impact of a new multilingual policy in education and broadcasting on the Tamang and the Tharu, arguing that the policy encouraged ethnic identity formation among the former and language creation among the latter. Language policy had spurred political activity on the part of both groups-what Partha Chatterjee calls the politics of the governed.
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Date: September 23, 2019
Time: 5
:00 PM - 6:30 PM
Location: Buchanan Tower, Room 1197
Presenter: Rohan D'Souza
Co-sponsored by: Interdisciplinary Histories Research Cluster, Department of History, Graduate Program in Science and Technology Studies, and CISAR.
The immense flowing rivers of South Asia ─ from the sprawling Indus system in the West to the volatile Irrawaddy in the East ─ were turned into modern rivers through the course of British colonial rule in the nineteenth century. This 'great hydraulic transition', I argue, was philosophically premised on the need to separate land and water ⎯ as two distinct non-overlapping natural domains. A transition effected, in the main, by the interventions of colonial engineering with which rivers were quantified as units of flow, disclosed by comprehensive control and harnessed with weirs, embankments and dams. The introduction of colonial hydraulic infrastructure, in essence, was to sustain land as legal claim and to be imagined as permanent ownership, while river flows were recast as resource.
As the quest for large dams and megawatts continues to convulse the political and ecological worlds of South Asia (and many other parts of the world), subversive histories about colonial engineering and river control, I argue, will be critical to how we re-imagine other social possibilities.
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This event is the first in our series with Green College, "Mehfil: Music, Text and Performance of South Asia." Stay tuned for monthly events all year long.
Date: September 26, 2019
Time: 5
:00 PM - 6:00 PM
Location: Green College
Presenter: Ashvini Sundaram and Arno Kamolika
Co-sponsored by: UBC Green College, Asta Alliance, Indian Classical Music Society of Vancouver (ICMSV), and CISAR.
This lecture demonstration will provide a brief overview of the aesthetics and vocabulary of Bharatanatyam by covering two types of presentations in Indian Classical dance - Nritta (pure dance) and Natya (storytelling). Arno and Ashvini will each narrate and present a love story exploring different mental states of a romantic heroine, either through the lens of the heroine or the heroine's friend.
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Date: September 28, 2019
Time: 6:00 PM - 9:00 PM
Location: Centre Stage, Surrey City Hall
Co-sponsored by CISAR
In the recent past, four of Pakistan's prominent women artists/activists have passed away. Those women are Sabeen Mahmud (activist, murdered in Karachi), Fahmida Riaz (poet/activist), Asma Jahangir (lawyer/HR activist), Madeeha Gauhar (Theatre actor/director/producer). We have not had the chance to mourn their deaths or to celebrate their lives even though each one of them, with many others, had stood up to the oppressors and had dedicated her life to 'naming the unnamed' in the face of adversity.
Surrey Muse Arts Society (SMAS), in collaboration with South Asian Network for Secularism and Democracy (SANSAD) and Committee of Progressive Pakistani Canadians (CPPC), is honored to produce a memorial program to present the four women's lives and their life long contributions to Pakistani society and to international women's movements.
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Curated by Dr. Anne Murphy and CISAR Research Associate Raghavendra Rao K.V.
On display until October 1, 2019 at the I.K. Barber Learning Centre (1st floor).
The works on view on the ground floor of the I.K. Barber Learning Centre resulted from a series of residencies and exhibitions in India and the UK in 2018-9 as a part of "Creative Interruptions," an international arts and humanities research project designed to use creativity as a way of connecting people and communities across borders. It was funded by a major grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Council of the UK, with additional support from UBC, under the direction of Project Lead Churnjeet Mahn (Strathclyde University, UK). The Punjab-centred component of the larger "Creative Interruptions" project focused on using the arts and humanities to investigate cultural amnesia in the partitioned Punjab. CISAR Director Dr. Anne Murphy and Research Associate Raghavendra Rao K.V. were members of the creative team for the project.
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South Asia-related Courses
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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.
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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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Due Date: October 18, 2019 at 4:00 PM
The Centre for India and South Asia Research (CISAR) at The University of British Columbia invites submissions for the 2019 Nehru Humanitarian Graduate Scholarship in Indian Studies. The annual $1,000 scholarship is offered by Dr. and Mrs. D. P. Goel to a graduate student pursuing the political, historical, economic, religious, social, or cultural study of India. The award is made on the recommendation of the Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies, in accordance with findings of the Adjudication Committee of the Centre for India and South Asia Research.
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CISAR Graduate Student Travel Grant 2019-20
Due Date: November 15, 2019
The Centre for India and South Asia Research offers 2 conference/workshop travel grants per year at up to $500 each for current graduate students at UBC to support travel to present papers on topics related to any part of South Asia or the South Asian Diaspora. Applications due November 15, 2019.
Recipients of the travel grant will be invited to speak in the annual seminar series at CISAR.
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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.
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