Call for Papers - Y-SASM 2016

Call for Papers: Transformations of ‘the Political’
Young South Asia Scholars Meet (Y-SASM), CeMIS, Göttingen, 24-25th June, 2016

Since 2010, Y-SASM has aimed to provide a platform for interdisciplinary exchange among junior scholars in the field of South Asian Studies, including PhD students, advanced MA/MPhil students, early career Post-Docs and non-tenured faculty staff. While contributions from other places are welcome the main idea is to strengthen the South Asia network within Europe (http://y-sasm.blogspot.de).

The theme of this year’s workshop will be the ‘political’. Existing political movements,  whether for or against broader issues of globalisation, capitalism, development, democracy, growth, governance, infrastructure, knowledge production, worker welfare, gender, inequality, education and caste for example, force us not only to rethink politics and political performance, but also the ‘political’ itself. How do we think of the ‘political’ after the demise of the notion of the ‘pure political’? In the 1980s scholars called for a return to politics and sought to define the ‘political’ in opposition to the ‘social’ and the ‘economic’. This understanding of the ‘pure political’ was critiqued by scholars who argued for a broadened understanding of the political in order to include claims raised by those usually seen as part of ‘non-political’ spheres.  Hence questions of inclusion and exclusion, i.e. access to political power, unavoidably arise in connection to the political.

At the same time, the ‘political’ was also defined as distinct from mere ‘politics’ or ‘police’/’policy’ (state institutions and their practices). Workers’ protests, peasants and tribal movements, Dalits’ and women’s struggles or other mass actions were seen as part of the broader domain of the political though often subtly distinguished from politics proper by being labelled as ‘pre-political’, ‘apolitical’ or ‘anti-political’, for instance. The cultural and textual turn widened our understanding of such subaltern action and speech, but at the same time the focus from the ‘political’ receded.

This workshop seeks to bring together ongoing scholarly reflections on these multiple articulations of the ‘political’, shaped intimately by ‘located histories’ but connected to broader issues of conceptual and material transformations within the rapidly changing global environment.

Topics to be discussed include, but are not limited to:

1. State and Governance: State power has been thought of variously as the state in practice, the product of political philosophies, an ensemble of institutions and the monopoly of legitimate violence. How do people’s actions subject, transform, and define state practices and vice versa? What, in fact, is the relation between the state and power? Which concepts of ‘the state’ are helpful for us? What ethics, morals, ideologies, and practical concerns have defined the visions of the state and forms of governance in South Asia and how have they shifted over time? We invite papers that look, for instance, at the relationship between people and state institutions, the limits of state power and the role of non-state actors, or analyse the relationship of state power with different ideologies such as welfarism, populism, liberalism, neo-liberalism and laissez-faire within the South Asian context.

2. Politics of Knowledge Production: Knowledge production has been central to both the emergence and exercise of power and politics. The way knowledge is produced, collected, interpreted, codified, and catalogued has not only defined the fate of empires but also of the concerned people whether ruler or ruled. For example, knowledge of history not only constitutes identities (of nations, races, castes etc.), rethinking and rewriting history refashions those identities.  Under this rubric, we invite researchers who explore history writing both academic and popular, textbook production, censoring of texts, etc.

3. Political Performance: Performance is an essential part of political representation at different levels, including campaigning and movements using certain symbols and slogans. Performative art (theatre, movies, etc.), can also have political or “anti-political” messages which shape public opinion. There are, moreover, less obvious spheres in which performance plays an important role. If, for instance, we understand bureaucratic procedures as ‘performance’, how does the performance of administrative officers shape how people think of “the state” and relate to it? Including these and other possible arenas, the workshop will engage with questions of what our analysis of the political can gain from closer engagements with performance as a lens of examination.

4. Development and Dissent: Development has been a key term defining both the state’s imperatives and popular expressions in post-colonial South Asia. While its form has been fought over bitterly; its presence and power in discourses concerning the production of urban infrastructure, resource extraction through Special Economic Zones, poverty alleviation programmes and new ‘welfare’ measures such as the restructuring of the public distribution system and primary education have been continuous and insistent.

5. Labouring Lives and the Politics of Labour: Labour politics and the position of labourers has radically transformed and shifted both in South Asia and worldwide. ‘The demise of labour politics’ resonates both in workers’ actions and in academic writings. Does the decline of trade unions and in the visible presence of working class politics or the rise of precarious informal labour really mean the demise of labour as proclaimed in academic writings?  Or has labour politics shifted to other arenas such as the recent sanitation workers strike in New Delhi? Amongst other themes, we invite papers on contemporary worker politics, the ways labouring classes make their presence visible in public, and the blurring of boundaries between home and work, as well as between worker politics and other political formations.

6. Contested cultures: Culture is often seen as belonging to the sphere of society and as distinct from ‘the political’ and matters of the state. To rethink the relation of these spheres, the workshop offers a platform to discuss questions such as: Is culture produced by the state? Or are states, on the contrary, effects of cultural processes? Are they separate at all, and can culture be confined to the realm of society? Amongst a huge range of different concepts of culture, which help us best to analyse transformations of the political? The debate could gain from exemplary examinations of cultural patterns and processes as well as of political and institutional cultures.

Application and Contact

We ask accepted presenters to provide a written version of their paper in advance so that commentators can prepare substantial feedback and look for fruitful ways to bring insights together. Papers will be also pre-circulated among the participants to facilitate exchange during the meeting. We hope that such a podium can enrich individual studies, broaden research scope and provide participants and attendees with ideas for further scholarly projects.

Please send your application, including an abstract of 300 words together with a short CV to y.sasmconf@gmail.com by 30^th September, 2015. Please be aware that while we aim to secure funding, we are unable at this time to guarantee any support to participants with regard to travel and accommodation costs.

Y-SASM 2012 in Heidelberg

The next Y-SASM will be held at the South Asia Institute at Heidelberg University from the 14^th -16^th June, 2012.

The thematic focus of the Y-SASM 2012 is concerned with the implications of urbanization in South Asian towns and small cities. The title is:

Beyond the Metropolis:
Implications of Urbanisation in Towns and Small Cities in South Asia

Application deadline for presenters is 31^st January 2012. Please send your short abstract and CV to y.sasmconf@gmail.com. 

Call for Papers

In response to the positive feedback to the workshops held in Berlin in the last two years, the Young South Asia Scholars Meet (Y-SASM) has been established as an annual workshop. The Y-SASM is to take place on a rotational basis at a host university, which this year will be the South Asia Institute at Heidelberg University. The workshop will be held from the 14^th -16^th June, 2012.

The workshop has the declared aim of providing young scholars working on South Asia with a platform for presenting their own research and interacting with scholars from various disciplines. Thereby, it offers an opportunity to establish research networks across the German-speaking region and beyond.

The thematic focus of the Y-SASM 2012 is concerned with the implications of urbanization in South Asian towns and small cities.

For quite some time now South Asian urban studies have been centred on the role and relevance of megacities. So far, these studies have highlighted the importance of urbanising processes for regional and societal developments in metropolises, but have neglected towns and smaller cities. Megacities like Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, Karachi and Dhaka have hitherto been the focus of scholarly attention even though processes of urbanisation affect a much wider populace than those living in urban agglomerations. Given that a substantial number of city-dwellers in South Asia inhabit medium sized towns and small cities which impact severely on their respective rural hinterlands, analysing these urban environments is crucially important.

Processes of urbanisation provide a nexus for various disciplinary approaches: contributions from fields such as anthropology, sociology, geography, economics, political science, history, literary and cultural studies can enrich our understanding about the manifold ways in which the construction of urbanism is intimately entangled with the multidimensional societal developments in South Asia.

Thus, this workshop is interested in including papers from various disciplinary backgrounds that can highlight how the urban studies are enriching research on South Asia. Of particular relevance would be contributions pertaining to:

1. Theories and concepts of urbanism 
2. Urbanism and infrastructure: Architecture, city-planning, transportation, sanitation (social) communication 
3. Urbanism and economy: Capital, finance, work and labour, industry
4. Urbanism, mobility and migration: Urban-rural continuum
5. Urbanism and social distinction: Class, caste and ethnicity
6. Urbanism and conflicts: Social, economic, ethno-religious (communalism)
7. Urbanism and politics: Polity, governance and administration
8. Urbanism and religion: New sites, patterns and ideologies of worship
9. Urbanism and aspirations: Social change, ‘modernity’ and new patterns of consumption
10. Knowledge production regarding small cities: historiography, languages (vernacular urbanism), literatures and embodied knowledge

Y-SASM wishes to combine its aim of facilitating lively thematically focused debate with its goal of promoting exchange between young scholars.

Please send your abstracts (400-500 words, indicating the topic of your research) and a short CV to the organizers no later than 31^st January 2012. The abstracts will then be reviewed and successful candidates will be contacted by the end of February. Besides paper-presentators, all interested scholars working on South Asia are cordially invited to participate in the workshop. Lastly, in view of the fact that funding is as yet uncertain, we kindly request our participants and guests to arrange for their own travel and accommodation.

Organisers:

Kai Fürstenberg (South Asia Institute Heidelberg), Rafael Klöber (South Asia Institute Heidelberg), Manju Ludwig (South Asia Institute Heidelberg), Felix Otter (South Asia Institute Heidelberg)

Contact: y.sasmconf@googlemail.com

2011 CALL FOR PAPERS: Engendering and Degendering South Asian Studies

In response to the positive feedback to the workshop held at the Zentrum Moderner Orient (Berlin) in July last year, the Young South Asia Scholars Meet (Y-SASM) has been established as an annual workshop. The Y-SASM is to be held on a rotational basis at host universities, which this year will be the South Asian Studies Seminar of the Humboldt University, Berlin. The workshop will be held from the 19^th -21^st of May, 2011.

Last year, the workshop had the declared aim of providing young South Asianists with a platform for exchange and interaction that could further the integration and proliferation of research networks across the German-speaking region and beyond. The workshop reflected the vibrancy of South Asian Studies in the region and we hope that its institutionalization in the form of Y-SASM will contribute to and facilitate this trend.

In contrast to last year’s workshop, Y-SASM 2011 will have a thematic focus in order to encourage fruitful discussion. The topic of the Y-SASM 2011 is gender.

For quite some time now South Asian gender studies has been successfully highlighting the role of women in South Asian History. With recent developments in the field, however, we hold that gender studies can no longer be equated to women studies. Instead gender has increasingly evolved as a critical perspective with an inherently interdisciplinary character which can thus throw light on a far wider range of settings, constellations and problems in the South Asian region.

Historically, gender as an academic perspective has its roots in feminist theory and women studies, which emerged as an exclusively interventionist paradigm in the late 1960s and early 1970s and manifested itself in diverse feminist movements across the world, including South Asia. Since then, gender studies has come into its own as an academic field that questions existing forms of knowledge production. Significantly, it has come a long way in finding a balance between its role as a critical and theoretical perspective and its normative interventionist ideals. Indeed, the need for deconstructing binary categories such as 'women' and 'men' and the importance of questioning derivative binaries of sexuality is now highlighted. For example, since the 1990s, queer theory has been at the forefront in contesting the categorization of gender and sexuality essentialist lines. In the same way, there is need to continue emphasizing the gender perspective in South Asian Studies while simultaneously questioning its binary premises; thereby both engendering and degendering South Asian studies.

Thus, this workshop is interested in papers from various disciplinary backgrounds that can highlight how the gender perspective is enriching South Asian studies. We are looking for contributions pertaining to:

1. Sexualities and Gender
2. Gender and Technology
3. Historiography of Gender in South Asian Studies
4. Gender and Violence
5. Gender and Work
6. Gender: Development, Education and Health
7. Gender, Caste and Tribe
8. Gender: Communalism, Religion and Law
9. Gender in Literature and Media
10. Gender: the National and the Transnational

Y-SASM wishes to combine its aim of facilitating lively thematically focused debate with its goal of promoting exchange between new and young scholars. Thus, in addition to the thematic panels, one section of the workshop will be devoted to providing space to scholars to presenting their new projects. These presentations may be held on topics that fall outside the theme of the workshop.

Please send your abstracts (400-500 words) to the organizers no later than 15^th February 2011. Other than those who will be directly participating in the workshop (through presentation), we invite all interested scholars working on South Asia to take part in the workshop. We hope, in this way, to begin the work of building up a new network of younger scholars working on South Asia. Currently, our funding situation is unclear and we therefore we strongly request our participants and guests to arrange for their own travel and accommodation. 

Organisers:

Sadia Bajwa (Humboldt University, Berlin), Maria Framke (Jacobs University Bremen), Mette Gabler (Humboldt University, Berlin), Maria Moritz (Jacobs University, Bremen), Nitin Sinha (Zentrum Moderner Orient, Berlin)

Contact:

Sadia Bajwa: sadia.bajwa@asa.hu-berlin.de

Call for Papers 2010 - ZMO, Berlin

Workshop, 15.07.-17.07.2010

Identifying new themes in South Asian History

We organise this workshop with two objectives, one, strategic and another thematic. One of our aims is to bring the scholars working at the doctoral and post-doctoral stages on South Asia together. Often we, the co-organisers, have felt that the dialogue between  people working on South Asia in different universities and research centres in Germany has greater potential to be integrated into a stronger research network or networks than has been realised. The idea is to facilitate this dialogue across places, disciplines, and themes.

Keeping this objective in mind, we have tried to keep the thematic base of our workshop quite broad, although with a strong objective of addressing new fields and research areas in the social history of South Asia. To this end, we have chosen three themes that, we believe, open up a wide range of historical and contemporary questions and debates. The disciplinary focus of the workshop is on History but we strongly encourage participants from other disciplines to apply.

Space, technology and transnationality have emerged as key fields in understanding the social histories of both modern and early modern periods. While on the one hand concepts like circulation have been applied to explore the diverse regimes of mobility of goods, people, ideas, and artefacts both at the micro and macro levels, the global turn and the paradigm of ‘connected histories’ on the other has reinvigorated the historical research on the nature and forms of international ties in different aspects, say political, state formation, religion and, not least, the economy. Our aim is to further this development by looking at overlapping historiographical trends and historical practices by addressing one or more than one of these key issues.

The intersection between technology and space, for instance, has a great potential to chart out not only independent histories of those technologies (for example, print; infrastructural technologies like metalled roads, telegraph, post, railways and motor cars; technologies of ‘entertainment’ like cinema, gramophone and so on), but also to unravel the processes that constituted, influenced and altered the nature of social and physical space and sociabilities. Some of the questions that can be addressed through this are:

What was the role of new infrastructural technologies in producing/changing the nature of existing urban spaces?

How did these technologies, or did they at all, affect the spatial linkages, say between urban and rural parts?

These changes can be mapped through a number of vectors – commodity exchange, mercantile networks, mobility and migration of people, money remittances and reimbursements (through post and telegraph), and so on.

We are very specific on getting contributions that deal with gender. Although in recent years the study of technology has come a long way from its earlier avatar (which mostly revolved around policy studies) the role of gender is still inadequately addressed. For instance, railway historiography has given us the fact that subsequent to the introduction of railways the number of third class passengers and the practice of pilgrimage increased. And from the historiography on nationalist discourse we know that women had become the site that reflected the ‘pure’ and ‘uncontaminated’ of the traditional culture that helped reconfigure the nationalist/elitist response to colonialism. Did this reconfiguration deny women the right to step outside? Did the new technology fail to break the binary of inside (home) and outside (world)? These two seemingly disparate historiographies can be brought together by looking at the gendered form of mobility. In each of these aspects, we intend to weld the discursive and the material, and avoid a narrowly limited focus on either.

Print and other forms of media provide another crucial mediation to approach the varied aspects of social history. How did printed texts and visuals, musical and cinematic productions, shape cultural, moral, emotional, didactic and political views, say along the lines of community, caste, class, region, gender and race? How, more broadly, did new forms of representation and new aesthetic forms insert themselves into the lives of people? With the use of rich (and new) empirical sources how could we address the issues of print and performance, textuality and orality, and ‘high’ and ‘low’ productions. How these productions were consumed at different spaces (bookshops, reading rooms, railway platforms, and book fairs) and how they simultaneously created new spaces and habits (for example, by the 1930s, at least amongst the European population in India, it had become a standard practice to read a novel while travelling) are questions that need to be unravelled by further historical research.

For a long time research on South Asia focussed on local, regional or national levels, while neglecting more trans-territorial and 'global' questions. New insights could be gained by exploring, for instance, questions about how transnational mobility and migration influenced worldviews and ideologies. What kinds of international networks were built up with South Asian participation and to what degree did these networks affect the political, social, economic and ideological constellations within India?

Please send the abstracts (400-500 words) to the organisers no later than 15 April. Other than those who will be directly participating in the workshop (through paper presentation), we invite all interested scholars working on South Asia to take part in the workshop. We hope, in this way, to begin the work of building up a new network of younger scholars working on South Asia. Currently, we are in the middle of making application for funding and therefore we strongly request our participants to arrange for their travel and accommodation. 

Organisers:

Nitin Sinha (Zentrum Moderner Orient, Berlin), Anna Sailer (Centre of Modern Indian Studies, Georg August University Göttingen), Aditya Sarkar, (Centre of Modern Indian Studies, Georg August University Göttingen), Maria Framke (Jacobs University Bremen)

Contact:

Nitin Sinha, nsinhan@@googlemail.com