The First Annual Graduate Student Conference on South Asia

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Conference Description

The goal of this conference was to gather a cross and interdisciplinary group of graduate researchers working on contemporary issues in South Asia for friendly discussion and critique. We invited graduate students at any stage in their graduate career, either pre or post dissertation research, to submit papers in both the humanities and the social sciences related to South Asia. While particularly interested in current transformations, we also invited papers exploring their historical lineages, ruptures, and conjunctures.

• Borders
  Much contemporary work on globalization has suggested the withering away of the nation-state, yet in South Asia, while migration, transnationalism, and multi-culturalism are increasingly critical issues, borders themselves (cultural, social, and political) also remain central to the lives of millions. Presentations will explore questions relating to the problems of borders-whether on migration, diaspora, displacement, representation, or identity-as well as the ongoing processes of their creation and maintenance.
  
  
• Violence
  Communal, sectarian, military, and state-sponsored violence remain critical problems in South Asia today. Participants will present research on the production, effects, aftermaths, representations of, and responses to violence in South Asia.
  
  
• Environments
  While some of the most internationally visible social movements in South Asia have been organized around resource access and protection, access to land, water, health-care, and intellectual property remain central questions in South Asia's development problematic(s). We seek to explore such struggles that interrogates questions of identity, voice, and the ways that debates around access have been and continue to be drawn.
  
  
• Methods/Historiography
  South Asian studies have, in the past fifty years, proved a vibrant arena for interrogating humanities, social scientific, and area-based research. Papers will reflect on continuing methodological, critical, and literary transformations in research and writing in, on, and about South Asia both in the wake of Subaltern Studies and in light of South Asia's changing social, cultural, environmental, and political landscape.
  
  

This conference was free and open to the public.

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