Thursday, October 22, 2009

Preconference Events

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3rd Annual South Asian Legal Studies Preconference

"Early Modernity" in Sri Lanka, South Asia and Southeast Asia

Feminist Pre-Conference: The “State” of Sexuality

Fourth Annual Himalayan Policy Research Conference

Workshop on Transforming a Dissertation into a Book

Preconference Details

3rd Annual South Asian Legal Studies Preconference
Organizer: Don Davis - drdavis@wisc.edu
Time: 2:00 - 6:00 pm
Location: Lubar Commons (7200 Law), University of Wisconsin Law School

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).

Topics to be announced.

"Early Modernity" in Sri Lanka, South Asia, and Southeast Asia
Organizer: John Rogers - rogersjohnd@aol.com
Time: TBA
Location: Concourse Hotel

Participants:
Zoltan Biedermann (University of London)
Prachi Deshpande (University of California--Berkeley)
Charles Hallisey (Harvard University)
Patrick Peebles (University of Missouri—Kansas City)
John Rogers (American Institute for Sri Lankan Studies)
Alicia Schrikker (Leiden University)
Sujit Sivasundaram (University of London)
Ramya Sreenivasan (University of Buffalo)
Alan Strathern (Cambridge University)
As the program is still being formulated, other participants are to be added.

Abstract:
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. This preconference will focus on the broader implications of new research on Sri Lanka covering the period circa 1400-1900. Through dialog between Sri Lankanists and scholars working on other Asian regions, it will address the challenge of writing histories that both capture what is distinctive about particular places, and which also acknowledge the important role of transregional influences. Preconference themes will include changes in literary culture, notions of kingship and political theory, and the role of European power and ideas both before and after the presence of "Enlightenment modernity."

The preconference will have four sessions, two in the morning and two in the afternoon. Six papers will be provided to registered participants in advance. The first three panels will begin with comments from discussants, followed by brief responses from the paper-givers. The final session will be devoted to a general discussion of the preconference themes. Registration will be free.

Feminist Pre-Conference: The "State" of Sexuality
Organizer: Anjali Arondekar - aarondek@ucsc.edu
Time: TBA
Location: Concourse Hotel

There will be an open call for papers. 4 panels will be convened. Confirmed/invited participants:
Geeta Patel, (co-organizer), Department of Women's Studies, University of Virginia
Anjali Arondekar (co-organizer), Department of Feminist Studies, UCSC
Mrinalini Sinha, Department of History, Penn-State U.
Mary John, Center for Women's Development Studies, New Delhi
Svati Shah, Department of Women's Studies, U-Mass, Amherst
Ashwini Tambe, Department of History, University of Toronto

Abstract:
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, we invite presentations that examine what is at stake for us to carve out a recursive relationship to the “state?”

The types of issues we envisage participants addressing will 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?

Other related topics include:
• The Sign of the State: What does one understand by the sign of the “state?” What are the languages through which the “state” intersects with the sign of “sexuality?” We particularly welcome presentations that address questions of caste, class and rights discourses.
• Liberal diasporas and the State: How do the apparatuses of the state find consolidation, subversion, complication in diasporic imaginings around the question of sexuality? Presentations could engage with visual or discursive responses to such questions.
• Affective State(s): What are the ways in which modalities of sentiment, affect, emotion entangle with the logic of state discourses? What role does sexuality play within such exchanges?

Fourth Annual Himalayan Policy Research Conference
Organizer: Alok Bohara - bohara@unm.edu
Time: TBA
Location: Concourse Hotel

Call for papers HERE

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)
Organizer: Susan Wadley - sswadley@syr.edu
Time: TBA
Location: Concourse Hotel

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.