Pre Conference – 38th Annual Conference on South Asia – 22-23 Oct 2009

Preconference Events | Conference Programme see here

Thursday, October 22, 2009

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3rd Annual South Asian Legal Studies Preconference
Time: 2:00 – 6:00 PM
Location: Lubar Commons (7200 Law), University of Wisconsin Law School
For more information, contact Donald R. Davis, Jr.

“Early Modernity” in Sri Lanka, South Asia and Southeast Asia<!–
Time: 9 AM—5 PM
Location: Senate Rooms A & B, Concourse Hotel
For more information, contact Dr. John Rodgers roge

Feminist Pre-Conference: The “State” of Sexuality
Time: 9 AM—6 PM
Location: Capitol Room B, Concourse Hotel
For more information, contact Anjali Arondekar

Fourth Annual Himalayan Policy Research Conference
Time: 8 AM – 8 PM
Location: Capitol & Madison Ballrooms, Concourse Hotel
Lunch served in University Rooms, Concourse Hotel
For more information, contact Alok Bohara

Workshop on Transforming a Dissertation into a Book (Closed by invitation only)

Wednesday, October 21
Time: 4 – 8 PM
Location: Assembly Room, Concourse Hotel

Thursday, October 22
Time: 8 AM – 8 PM
Location: Assembly Room & Caucus Rooms, Concourse Hotel
Lunch served in Conference Room IV, Concourse Hotel

For more information, contact Susan Wadley

Preconference Details

3rd Annual South Asian Legal Studies Preconference
Time: 2:00 – 6:00 pm
Location: Lubar Commons (7200 Law), University of Wisconsin Law School
For more information, contact Dr. Donald R. Davis, Jr.

Panels to be organized by Flavia Agnes, lawyer at the Bombay High Court, women’s rights advocate, and co-founder of Majlis and Jayanth Krishnan, professor at the William Mitchell College of Law (soon to be Indiana University Maurer School of Law).

Click HERE for more information.

“Early Modernity” in Sri Lanka, South Asia, and Southeast Asia
Time:9 AM—5 PM
Location: Senate Rooms A & B, Concourse Hotel
For more information, contact Dr. John Rodgers rogersjohnd@aol.com

Sponsored by the American Institute for Sri Lankan Studies

Sri Lanka has been largely absent in debates about how to understand “early modernity” and “modernity” in Asia and the Indian Ocean world. The island, however, has been at the center of transregional economic, cultural and political networks since at the least the middle of the first millennium CE, and its past has much to contribute to these issues.

Through dialog between Sri Lankanists and scholars working on other Asian regions, this preconference will focus on some broader implications of new research on Sri Lanka. How should we conceptualize “early modern” in areas such as literary culture, political theory, and social organization? What was the role of European power and ideas both before and after the presence of “Enlightenment modernity”? Given Sri Lanka’s position at the center of transregional networks, the preconference will also address the general challenge of writing histories that capture what is distinctive about particular places, but which also acknowledge the important role of transregional forces.

The preconference will be organized around six papers with a focus on Sri Lanka, covering the period circa 1400-1900. These papers will be provided in advance to registered participants. At the preconference each paper will be briefly introduced by two discussants, one whose work focuses primarily on India, and the other on Southeast Asia.

Registration is free. If you plan to attend this preconference, please send an email by September 15, 2009 to John Rogers at rogersjohnd@aol.com. Include your name, discipline and institutional affiliation (if any).

Preliminary Program (final version will be posted in early October):

9:00—9:15: Registration and Refreshments

9:15 – 9:20: Welcome to Participants (Charles Hallisey)

9:20 – 9:35: Introduction to Goals of the Preconference (John Rogers)

9:35—12:15 MORNING PAPERS: Chair: C.R. de Silva (Old Dominion)

9:35—10:20: Charles Hallisey (Harvard University), Changes in Sinhala Literary Culture, 15 th—18 th centuries [discussants Ramya Sreenivansan, Tony Day]

10:20—11:05: Zoltan Biedermann (Birkbeck College, London), Colombo versus Cannanore: Contrasting Structures of Two Colonial Port Cities (1500-1700) [discussants Preeti Chopra, Tony Day]

11:05—11:30: Break

11:30—12:15: Alan Strathern (Cambridge University), Sri Lanka in the Long Early Modern Period: Its Place in a Comparative Theory of Second Millennium Eurasian History [discussants Prachi Deshpande, Anne Hansen]

LUNCH BREAK, 12:15—1:30

1:30 – 4:15 AFTERNOON PAPERS: Chair: TBA

1:30—2:15: Alicia Schrikker (Leiden University), Dutch Imperial Ideology in Sri Lanka and Java, late 18 th century [discussants Prachi Deshpande, Penny Edwards]

2:15—3:00: Sujit Sivasundaram (London School of Economics), Ethnicity in Sri Lanka and the Advent of British Rule in the Subcontinent [Ramya Sreenivansan, Anne Hansen]

3:00—3:30: Break

3:30—4:15: Patrick Peebles (University of Missouri—Kansas City), Unchartered Justice: Revising the Ceylon Charter, 1833-48 [Preeti Chopra, Penny Edwards]

4:15—5:00 CONCLUDING SESSION: Chair: John Rogers

Feminist Pre-Conference: The “State” of Sexuality
Time: 9 AM—6 PM
Location: Capitol Room B, Concourse Hotel
For more information, contact Anjali Arondekar

At the sixth South Asian Feminist preconference at Madison in 2008 (“The Body in South Asian Feminism”), and in our discussions over the past five years of the feminist preconference, a variety of discussions touched on the significations and practices surrounding the gendered body in local, national, regional, diasporic, and transnational contexts.

This year’s preconference continues such interrogations by focusing on the “State” of Sexuality as a nexus for our critical concerns. The past decade or so (particularly the post 9/11 era) has witnessed a rapid rise in scholarship that seeks to seize or transform the language of the “state” for liberatory ends.  Such an attachment to the reparative and/or divisive logic of the “state” is most evident in minoritized knowledge-formations such as sexuality studies and South Asian studies.  In the face of contemporary challenges about the limits of scholarship bowing out to the forces of globalization, presenters will examine what is at stake for us to carve out a recursive relationship to the “state?”

Participants will address engage two central questions: What are the conversations instituted about sexuality in relationship to the “state”? How does sexuality studies’s own adherence/attachment to the language of the “state” parochialize key assumptions about freedom, rights and the subject?

Program:

9:00 AM Opening Remarks

9:15 -10:45 AM Imaginative States

• “Kamala Suraiya and the seduction of the state funeral,” Rosemary George, University of California, San Diego

• “Traumatized Body, Resilient Human: the War of 1971 in Women’s Memories,” Yasmin Saikia, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

• “Figure and Desire: Inshallah Khan’s Rani Ketki ki Kahani,” Ruby Lal, Emory University

• “Inside Purdah/Outside Purdah: Sexuality,Islam and the State in Muhammad Hadi Ruswa’s Umrao Jan Ada ,” Krupa Shandilya, Cornell University & Taimoor Shahid, Lahore University,

10:45 – 11:00 AM Break

11:00 AM- 1:00 PM In the Case of 377 and Beyond

• “Addressing the Phobic and the Erotic in India,” Brinda Bose, Delhi University

• “A Year of Wonder: Sexuality, Rights-Seeking Campaigns, and the State in India,” Svati Shah, University of Massachusetts, Amherst

• “Analytics of Sodomy and the State,”Jyoti Puri, Simmons College

• “The Art of Personal Narratives: Sexuality Rights Activism in India and Provincializing this Homosexual Subject,” Akhil Katyal, School of Oriental and African Studies

• “Policing Affect: Lesbian Activism and the State in India,” Naisargi Dave, University of Toronto

1:00 – 2:00 PM Lunch

2:00 – 3:15 PM Alter(ed) States

• “Love and reservations: Thoughts on the gendered e/affects of Scheduled Tribe uplift,” Megan Moodie, University of California, Santa Cruz

• “jina amucha: The ‘State’ of dalit women,” Shailaja Paik, Union College

• “The Spaces between ‘MSM’ and ‘TG’: Vernacular Locations within State-funded NGO networks of West Bengal,” Aniruddha Datta, University of Minnesota

3:15 – 3:30 Tea Break

3:30 – 4:45 PM Sex/Work

• “Beyond the Promise of Laws: Bombay’s Sex Trade in Historical Perspective,” Ashwini Tambe, University of Toronto

• “Governmentalising the State: Voluntary Service and the Regulation of Prostitution in Interwar India,” Stephen Legg, University of Nottingham

• “Women’s Rights are Human Rights/Economic Rights are Human Rights: Gender and Labor under the Sign of Rights,” S. Charusheela, University of Nevada

• “‘Crazy little thing called love’: Sri Lankan migrant women’s contestations and the governance of sexuality, responsibility and relatedness,” Monica Smith, National University of Singapore

5:00 – 6:00 p.m. Women’s Studies in India: A Conversation with Mary John

Inderpal Grewal, Yale University
Mrinalini Sinha, Penn State University, University Park
Anjali Arondekar, University of California, Santa Cruz
Geeta Patel, University of Virginia
Priti Ramamurthy, University of Washington, Seattle
Mary John, Center for Women’s Development Studies, New Delhi

For any questions, please contact Anjali Arondekar at aarondek@ucsc.edu

Fourth Annual Himalayan Policy Research Conference
Time: 8 AM – 8 PM
Location: Capitol & Madison Ballrooms, Concourse Hotel
Lunch served in University Rooms, Concourse Hotel
For more information, contact Alok Bohara

Program Outline (pdf)

Participants
Alok K Bohara, Dept of Economics, University of New Mexico; Nepal Study Center
Mukti P Upadhyay, Dept of Economics, Eastern Illinois University
Vijaya R Sharma, Dept of Economics, University of Colorado-Boulder
Gyan Pradhan, Dept of Economics and Finance, Westminster College
Joel Heinen, Professor, Dept of Environmental Studies, Florida International University
Jeffrey Drope, Dept of Political Science, Marquette University
About 35-40 other participants from various US and international academic institutions

Abstract
The Nepal Study Center (NSC) at the University of New Mexico, its members and affiliated scholars request letting us organize the Third Annual Himalayan Policy Research Conference at the South Asian Conference venue of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, on Thursday October 16, 2008. The purpose is to promote scholarly interactions among the scholars with policy research interest on the Himalayan region and the countries in South Asia. We have had highly successful conferences in the past from 2006 to 2008 at your venue where scholars came to participate from several countries such as the US, Japan, Nepal, India, Switzerland, and Sweden.

The abstracts, proceedings, feedback from participants, and photos from our previous conferences are available HERE.

The main theme of the Himalayan Policy Research (HPR) Conference draws from the fields of development, democracy, governance, and environment. We consider these fields broadly as encompassing socio-economic growth (aggregate or sectoral), political transition, institutional development, governance and administrative reform, poverty and income distribution, education and health, regional development, gender and ethnicity, trade and remittances, aid and foreign direct investment, resource and environmental management, public-private partnership in technology and investment, child labor, and many other issues. The papers are expected to have important implications for public policy in one or more countries of the Himalayan region and South Asia.

One of the goals of the annual HPR conference is to form an Himalayan Policy Research Association and obtain a membership of the Allied Social Science Associations. This venue will be very valuable to create a scholarly network and promote our mission.

Workshop on Transforming a Dissertation into a Book (Closed by invitation only)

Wednesday, October 21
Time: 4 – 8 PM
Location: Assembly Room, Concourse Hotel

Thursday, October 22
Time: 8 AM – 8 PM
Location: Assembly Room & Caucus Rooms, Concourse Hotel
Lunch served in Conference Room IV, Concourse Hotel

For more information, contact Susan Wadley

Participants:
Kalyani Menon, DePaul University
Ruby Lal, Emory
John Echeverri-Gent, Virginia

Abstract
AIIS, APIS and AIBS are sponsoring a workshop (by invitation only) for aid junior scholars to transform dissertations into books. We hope to begin Wed. night with a talk by a younger scholar who successfully negotiated this process. The hands” on workshop will run all day Thurs.

Click HERE for more information.

(Source: 09/2009 – The Univesity of Wisconsin-Madison)