EVENT DETAILS

South Asia Graduate Conference at UC Irvine: Interrogating 'South Asia': Borders, Epistemology and Relationalities

The 2019 South Asia graduate conference at UC Irvine is the first graduate-led conference that focuses on South Asia at UCI. The theme of the conference is “Interrogating South Asia” which will include discussions on how and what constitutes borders territoriality and discursively. Specifically, this conference aims to inquire what it means to be working on/in South Asia or South Asian studies today, a field that has its origins in the U.S. military and foreign policy decision-making in the Cold War era. What kinds of relationalities—regional, national or transnational—does it proffer or obscure? What are some of the tensions/conflicts/contradictions that emerge from within the discipline, particularly since the field by definition involves a process of exclusion? How do contemporary forms of global capital both dissolve and consolidate these boundaries and borders? The conference features distinguished faculty from UC Irvine and other universities who focus on South Asia as well as graduate students from a variety of universities who seek to interrogate and engage with South Asia as both a geographically delimited territory and as an epistemological framework.

10th October, 7:00pm – 8:30pm at The Little Theatre (UCI)
Confluences and Divergences: Performance by the Post Natyam Collective

11th October, 8:30am – 6:00pm in HG1010
    8:30am     Breakfast and Registration
    9:00am-11:00am     Opening Plenary with Aijaz Ahmad, R. Radhakrishnan, Ketu Katrak, Kim Fortun, Vinayak Chaturvedi, and Anneeth Kaur Hundle
    11:15am-1:00pm     Panel I: Visuality and Affect
    1:00pm-2:00pm     Lunch
    2:00pm-3:45pm     Panel II: Dance Studies
    4:00pm-6:00pm     Reception and Artist Talk

12th October, 8:30am – 5:00pm in HG1010
    8:30am     Breakfast and Registration
    9:00am-10:45am     Panel III: Land and Agriculture
    11:00am-12:00pm     Jaideep Singh and Maari Zwick Maitreyi on ‘California Textbook Controversy’
    12:00pm-1:00pm     Lunch
    1:00pm-2:45pm     Panel IV: Language and Discourse
    3:00pm-5:00pm     Closing Roundtable with Utathya Chattopadhyaya (UCSB History), Saiba Varma (UCSD Anthropology), Nandini Chandra (UH English), Fatima Quraishi (UCR Art History), and Pasang Yangjee Sherpa (UW South Asia Center)

Co-sponsored by UCHRI; UCI Illuminations; UCI: Dean’s Reading Group-Social Sciences, Center for Ethnography, Sikh Studies, Department of Anthropology; UCI Humanities: Borders and Belonging, Humanities Commons, Center for Asian Studies, Department of History, Department of Asian American Studies and Department of Comparative Literature