Symposium

The American Institute of Indian Studies holds an annual dissertation-to-book workshop at the Madison South Asia Conference, co-sponsored by the American Institute of Bangladesh Studies, the American Institute of Pakistan Studies, and the American Institute of Sri Lankan Studies. The workshop aims to help a select number of recent PhDs re-vision their doctoral dissertations as books. Author participants are selected through an application process, and all admitted authors will submit a sample chapter and draft book proposal in advance, to be read by each member of their working group. The interdisciplinary workshop begins with a “Secrets of Publishing” Q&A discussion from 7-8:30 pm on Tuesday evening. During the day-long Wednesday symposium, we will divide into three groups of eight authors and three mentors each, to work intensively together discussing each project. We conclude the workshop with an all-group dinner at a nearby Indian restaurant. Faculty from diverse disciplines and areas of expertise will serve as mentors. Mentors have each published at least one book, specialize in a range of South Asian regions (including India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh), and come from various disciplinary backgrounds, including anthropology, sociology, history, literature, media studies, gender studies, and religious studies.

Organizer: Laura Brueck (Northwestern University)

The American Institute of Pakistan Studies (AIPS) is applying to host a symposium at the 54th Annual Conference on South Asia on Wednesday, October 28. This full-day symposium aims to mentor emerging scholars working on Pakistan-related research. If selected, the event will be the fifth such event at the Annual Conference on South Asia. The symposium will showcase new research by approximately eight US-based emerging scholars (both recent PhDs and graduate students with ABD status) whose research addresses Pakistan Studies. AIPS will hold an open call for applications, which it will widely advertise through its 40+ member institutions and its social media sites. It encourages abstracts from (but not restricted to) disciplines such as anthropology, sociology, political science, history, literature, religious studies, art history, music, women studies, film, and communications studies, etc. AIPS has identified established scholars to read the accepted papers and provide feedback, mentorship, and focused discussion following participants’ presentations. Because presenters get selected in advance, coupled with an in-depth question/answer/discussion period, the event will fully utilize a full-day and is inappropriate for the traditional conference panel format. AIPS’s emerging scholar symposiums enable emerging scholars to network with others in their field and expose them to established scholars who can act as additional advisors/mentors. The past AIPS Emerging Scholar Symposia held at the Annual Conference on South Asia have been instrumental in creating a nationwide dialogue between emerging and established Pakistan Studies scholars. Significant outcomes of past symposiums include published books, forged mentorships, written articles, and revised dissertations. Past symposium participants are also now successfully in tenure-track positions in academic institutions in the US.

Organizer: American Institute of Pakistan Studies

Inspired by last year’s panel on “Big Books,” this symposium will address the joys and problems of translating long works, such as novels, epics, the memoir, and anthologies of poetry, either singly-authored or authored by many. How do translators maintain control of plot, characters, and issues of extended dialog? When translating as a team, how are issues such as vocabulary choice and individual style present problems when degrees of consistency are desired throughout a text. How is authorial “voice” handled when translating large collections of poetry written using the same conventions?

Organizer: Martha Selby (Harvard University)

Our inaugural symposium “Deccan as Method” was immensely successful and highlighted Deccan’s importance in South Asian scholarship. Our second convening continues to explore Deccan as a mobile frontier, and a regional formation but with an intensive focus on longue duree social and cultural histories. The current preconference moves from justifying the region’s importance, to specifying its historical and conceptual boundaries. What methodological approaches, and diverse multilingual archives allow us to frame the region in its specific complexities? Participants at the 2025 meeting collectively raised questions on the physical, historical and social contours of Deccan, and what is made possible by thinking from the dual perspectives of Deccan as “region,” and as “frontier,” or borderland. We raised questions about the methodological valence of the term, and focused on the regional histories shaped by environment, economy, and politics that traverse the constraints of boundaries established by the formation of modern linguistic states. We reasserted that a focus across Deccan, indeed, offer some provocations for seeing the region anew. Keeping this in mind, our 2026 symposium will sharpen the focus and frame a distinctive vision for collaborative research on the region, drawing on existing scholarship while framing a future research agenda. To elaborate: The 2026 symposium moves away from the chronological limitations of the previous iteration to expand the temporal and environmental scope of studies on Deccan. Second, it frames literary, visual and material culture, that is, art history, archaeology, histories of science, and of literary cultures into conversation with social history and anthropology. Third, drawing on written reflections which articulate a collaborative approach to the studying Deccan, we plan to discuss establishing a scholarly network with plans for publication, a seminar in Bengaluru in December 2026, and elaborating a set of 3-4 short seminars with a focus on graduate student engagement.

Organizers: Sohini Chattopadhyay (Union College) and Anupama Rao (Barnard College, Columbia)

In India in 2002, men were quickly organized into communal mobs that carried out pogroms state authorities simultaneously facilitated and denied. In Afghanistan and Iraq, workers recruited from South Asian communities through labor networks staffed American military bases in active war zones. We tend to think of these as fundamentally different actors, one mobilized through ideology, the other recruited through labor markets. But both were assembled rapidly for work in the context of immense violence and abandoned when the job was done. Insurgent groups and paramilitaries are typically studied through the lens of ideology and communal mobilization. Private military companies and foreign military laborers are studied through market logic and individual profit. This neat division has kept two scholarly conversations apart despite striking operational similarities. Both rely on rapid recruitment, abbreviated training, and swift disposal. Both depend on infrastructures, whether organizational, relational, or material, that must exist before the first fighter is enlisted. And both produce violence workers whose afterlives, once the fighting ends, follow remarkably similar patterns of abandonment and disavowal. This workshop brings both sets of scholars together to ask what becomes visible when we stop sorting violence workers by motivation and look instead at how they are produced. What infrastructures make rapid mobilization possible? What role does ideology itself play when examined as one form of that infrastructure rather than as an explanation that stands apart from it? And what happens to these fighters when the infrastructure that produced them no longer needs them? By centering these questions, the workshop invites new conversations across South Asian about political violence, military labor, and the economies of organized force.

Organizer: Ali Raza (Lahore University of Management Sciences)

Detachment from worldly desires has long constituted one of the core values of South Asian religions. The scholarly conversation around this ideal continues to evolve, as is evidenced, for instance, by recent ethnographic interventions that point toward alternative models of ascetic indifference that do not conform to classical frameworks of renunciation articulated in, e.g., the Dharmaśāstras and related Sanskrit literature. Nevertheless, much of the intellectual, literary, and social history of dispassion (Skt. vairāgya) remains uncharted. Indeed, one can argue that even the semantic range of this concept has not been historically mapped. This is especially true of the past eight hundred years or so, a period that witnessed the crystallization of enduring conceptions and practices of religious austerity that persist in shaping religious life on the subcontinent and among the global diaspora. The sheer diversity of expressions of dispassion as, at the very least, a prerequisite for journeys of salvation, in this period invites an approach that intentionally transgresses regional, linguistic, religious, and temporal boundaries. Consequently, participants in this symposium explore what dispassion means across a range of different contexts, examining textual materials composed from the twelfth century to the twentieth, in languages as varied as Braj Bhāṣā, English, Kannada, Sanskrit, Tamil, and Telugu. In what ways do notions of dispassion engage with prevailing social, political, and institutional configurations? To what extent do considerations of aesthetics and gender mediate the production of particular formulations of ascesis? How do specific Śaiva and Vaiṣṇava devotional traditions, in dialogue with philosophical knowledge-systems such as Vedānta and Yoga, interpret the significance of worldly detachment? How is the concept factored into ideas of the ethical life? By addressing these questions, the symposium will open up dispassion as a multifaceted, mutable, and contested phenomenon of vital importance to the religious cultures of second-millennium South Asia.

Organizers: Eric Steinschneider (Ithaca College) and Srilata Raman (University of Toronto)

“The aspects of things that are most important for us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity,” wrote Wittgenstein. “One is unable to notice something because it is always before one’s eyes.” We miss, deflect, look past it toward what appears more significant, visible and analytically worthy. And nowhere is this absence more visible than regions marked by occupation. In such accounts, violence tends to organize the story. Life in its most ordinary and mundane forms gets foreshadowed. This symposium is an intervention into that foreshadowing. In Balochistan, where military occupation has been woven into the texture of everyday life for decades, the conventional boundaries between ordinary and extraordinary, the spectacular and invisible, the normal and abnormal collapse. What Mona Bhan and Haley Duschniski insist on looking at the ‘life’ violence produces; life which is maimed and left to mere living is how Jasbir Puar, Deepti Misri and Ather Zia demonstrate it. What remains when we place life, not violence, not resistance, at the center of our analytical gaze, is the aim of this symposium. This symposium brings the everyday, relational, ethical stories that have made life inhabitable in militarized Balochistan. It is organized around two themes. One, to focus on the textures of everyday life in Balochistan, what it feels like, sounds like, smells like, how it moves. Two, to engage with these textures through Indigenous epistemologies and knowledge systems: oral stories, art, poetry, photography, and films. Each panel is devoted to one of these forms, not to explain it, but to make it present, creating an ‘affective encounter’ with what it means to live ordinarily under extraordinary conditions. This reflects our methodological and ethical commitment as Baloch scholars: to approach everyday life through its own forms, letting Indigenous stories, poetry, and films carry what prose cannot.

Organizers: Bramsh Khan (Syracuse University) and Noor Bakhsh (York University, Toronto)

What conceptual work does the category of “vernacular” perform in contemporary Indian media? Does it describe media practices outside standardized institutional and industrial frameworks, or does it merely index scale, value, and address? When does a media form cease to be “vernacular,” and must the vernacular always be aligned with the category of the “minority”? Rather than resolving these definitional dilemmas, this symposium shifts the conversation to the everyday lives of media objects. Focusing on quotidian processes (from popular politics to subjective experience) and practices (such as selfies, blogs, meme pages, magazines, communal songs, and religious videos), we examine how media objects are situated, animated, and transformed in daily life. We begin from the premise that vernaculars—linguistic or medial—name ways of attending to and expressing everyday cultural practices. By foregrounding the ordinary trajectories of media objects, historically and in the present, we explore how their embeddedness in daily rhythms shapes their epistemological and political effects. The symposium advances a central methodological claim that the everyday provides a crucial analytic vantage point for understanding media’s cultural status and socio-political force. Tracing how media objects are embedded within quotidian rhythms, we aim to apprehend how they exceed or reconfigure dominant economies of representation and recognition. Bringing together scholars from comparative literature, art history, anthropology, cinema and media studies, sociology, and communication, we engage a wide corpus of forms—literature, photography, digital media, sculpture, and music. We invite approaches that treat media not simply as products of mass culture, but as objects overdetermined by everyday habitation and reinterpretation. In an era when new media ecologies unsettle established frameworks of cultural significance, we return to the ordinary as a generative site for apprehending media’s evolving meanings and effects.

Organizers: Nisarg P. (University of Southern California) and Shubham Shivang (University of Chicago)

The embodiment of divinities in South Asian traditions has received much scholarly attention (Holdrege 2015; 2016; Holdrege and Pechilis 2016; Waghorne et al. 1985). For instance, scholars such as Pechilis (2000) have argued for shifting the terminology of bhakti from ‘devotion’ to ‘participation,’ highlighting that bhakti requires active engagement in worship and emphasizes the physical embodiment necessary for the practitioner to fulfill their religious obligations. Novetzke underlines that “the publics of bhakti in South Asia require ’embodiment,’ the human as medium”(Novetzke 2007). For this symposium, we invite scholars to contribute papers that examine the conceptualization of embodiment, veneration, and presences of human figures of veneration in bhakti publics. The veneration of human presences need not be confined to a living, flesh‑and‑blood human body. Such presences may be embodied in multiple registers: as living practitioners, as deceased figures whose presence continues to be made real, or as non‑historical beings whose reality is affirmed through ritual and material practices. Such embodiment is made perceptible through the adornment, veneration, and circulation of their images, icons, literary invocations, hagiographies, material tracaes, and so forth. In this sense, the human figures and their presence are rendered real, tangible, and efficacious through the sensory and material practices. Through this symposium, we aim to explore the diverse ways in which the bodies of such human figures of veneration are imagined, theorized, enacted, and brought into relation with other embodied presences across South Asian traditions. We particularly welcome studies that investigate the sites and modes of such embodiment through a wide range of sources, including material and visual culture, textual traditions, performative practices, and ethnographic accounts. Given the cross-traditional scope of this inquiry, a symposium format is essential to accommodate more speakers and deeper dialogue. This extended time will facilitate the collaborative groundwork for a future edited volume.

Organizers: Máire White (Stanford University) and Kshitij Jain (University of Oxford)

Diasporic formations are increasingly shaped by the intensification of global media flows, especially in moments of crisis. As communities move across borders—whether through forced displacement, labor migration, or climate driven mobility—their media practices become essential infrastructures for sustaining identity, memory, and belonging. Crisis amplifies this dynamic: ruptures such as political repression, economic precarity, or environmental disaster not only precipitate migration but also reconfigure how diasporic subjects produce, circulate, and interpret media. These mediated circulations—ranging from social media storytelling and community radio to independent film and digital archives—forge transnational publics and challenge dominant narratives while enabling migrants to navigate uncertainty, question normative power hierarchies, and imagine progressive cross-racial bonds of solidarity. At the same time, media flows can intensify vulnerabilities, as misinformation, surveillance, and platform inequalities shape how crisis is represented and experienced. Thinking through diaspora at the intersection of media and crisis thus reveals how mobile communities continually negotiate the tension between fragmentation and connection, loss and reinvention, as they craft new forms of cultural expression and political presence across borders. This panel asks: What aesthetic strategies do diasporic artists and filmmakers employ to represent crisis, displacement, and the affective landscapes of migration? How do crisis-driven media practices reveal inequalities in global information flows and platform infrastructures? What can South Asian media exchanges within and beyond the nation-state tell us about the ways communities co opt, work around, and reimagine political subjectivities? Where does cultural labor fit within these dynamics, and how might examining the conditions and contingencies of such labor sharpen our understanding of diasporic media-making as both survival strategy and world-building practice?

Organizers: Darshana Mini (University of Wisconsin-Madison) and Pallavi Rao (University of Virginia)

This symposium brings South Asia studies research across disciplines into conversation with the anthropology of labor and the study of religion by asking: What happens when “religion” and “work” are placed within the same analytical frame? How do “religion” and questions of labor illuminate each other? Thinking with, as well as against, Weberian formulations of work as beruf—calling, discipline, and ascetic accumulation—we examine how religious practice and capitalist formations are co-constituted. Participants variously interrogate the many meanings, practices, and relationships that emerge from the co-constitution of religion and work in South Asia and its diasporas, past and present. Drawing from works-in-progress, participants ask a range of questions, including: How are work formations and processes of capitalist accumulation structured by religious practice (and vice versa), and what might this mean for the variegated ways in which capitalism morphs itself into newer avatars? Is the term “religion” even useful when thinking about, say, the alliance of capitalism with caste and kinship? What are some of the emergent formations of “work” and “religion” in contemporary South Asia? How might these newer assemblages of religion and work help us both understand and move beyond the naturalization of older legacies and frameworks through which “religious work and labor” has come to be understood, whether it is the Weberian assumptions that frame “work” in terms of virtue and economic productivity or even the liberatory claims associated with the laboring subject? What becomes visible when we attend not only to work, but to its “others” such as non-work, play, recreation, and refusal? Situating these questions in South Asia and its diasporas, the symposium rethinks the entanglements of religion and capitalism as well as the fundamental categories such as “religion”, “work”, and “labor” that are the conditions of possibility of these entanglements.

Organizers: Emilia Bachrach (Oberlin College) and Ridhima Sharma (University of Toronto)

This proposed symposium brings together scholars and artists working across art history, history, literature, anthropology, religious studies, performance studies, and allied disciplines in the humanities and social sciences to reconsider Odisha as a critical site for South Asian Scholarship. Odisha is one of the most internally diverse sites of the subcontinent, reflected most profoundly in its demographic, which includes a significant caste-oppressed and Adivasi population of the Indian subcontinent. Simultaneously, Odisha remains a site for diverse religious beliefs, literary cultures, performative traditions, and architectural praxis. Yet despite this density of cultural, social, and historical formations, Odisha remains curiously peripheral within dominant conversations in South Asian studies. Frequently eclipsed by its more institutionally and historiographically prominent neighbor, Bengal, scholarship on Odisha continues to receive uneven and sporadic attention. The consequence is not merely regional neglect but a missed opportunity to rethink broader questions of religion, regionality, material culture, and social formation in eastern India and the subcontinent at large. This symposium seeks to rebalance that longstanding aporia by foregrounding Odisha as a generative intellectual terrain rather than a marginal case study. Bringing together scholars and artists at diverse stages of their academic careers, the symposium aims to foster sustained interdisciplinary dialogue attentive to both longue durée historical processes and contemporary transformations, positioning Odisha as central to reimagining the analytical horizons of South Asian studies.

Organizers: Sinjini Chatterjee (Ohio State University) and Ujaan Ghosh (Ohio State University)

This symposium examines how ruins function as potent sites of memory and political authority in the making of modern nationhood in Afghanistan and India. Moving beyond viewing archaeology as a neutral recovery of the past, it argues that ruins are active political objects—material anchors through which states and communities construct narratives of sovereignty, civilizational continuity, and territorial legitimacy. By situating material remains within struggles over memory and power, the symposium shows how the past is continually reinterpreted to serve present political ends. Through a comparative focus on two postcolonial states shaped by imperial interventions and contested borders, the symposium explores how ruins are mobilized to narrate origins, authenticate authority, and define belonging. In India, monuments and archaeological sites have been incorporated into projects of civilizational nationalism, framing the nation as an enduring cultural continuum rooted in antiquity. In Afghanistan, premodern heritage has been entangled in geopolitics, nation-building, and protracted conflict, where ruins symbolize both resilience and vulnerability. In both contexts, material remains are deployed to stabilize authority, negotiate plural histories, and manage competing territorial claims. The symposium also interrogates colonial legacies embedded in archaeological knowledge production, examining how postcolonial regimes inherit and repurpose these frameworks. By foregrounding preservation, destruction, restoration, and display as political acts, it highlights deeper struggles over memory, identity, and sovereignty. Bringing together scholars across disciplines, the symposium fosters dialogue on archaeology’s entanglement with nation-building and argues that ruins are dynamic instruments through which modern nationhood is imagined and materially inscribed in the contemporary global political landscape.

Organizers: Agnik Bhattacharya (University of California, Irvine) and Mou Banerjee (University of Wisconsin-Madison)

In the last two decades, South Asian cities have not only become important subjects and sites for global urban scholarship but also, in necessitating attention to caste, coloniality, embodiment, informality, and everyday practice, have reshaped key theories of the urban. Meanwhile as flooding, heat, drought, air pollution, and other climate catastrophes unfold, questions of vulnerability and survival in the city have gained immediacy not only for research and planning, but in everyday life, learning, and labor. In this context, the South Asian Urban Climates symposium will ask how building knowledge, teaching, and fighting for and from the South Asian city are necessarily interconnected. It will bring scholars, teachers, artists, activists, and cultural producers to workshop pedagogies for collective futures that are grounded in places, practices, and ecologies across the region. To do this, we will build from ongoing dialogue in the South Asian Urban Climates community and think with experimental, community-centered, and climate-justice pedagogies that refuse the coloniality of disciplines, borders, and social categories. The conversation will be grounded in, and examine ways to mobilize, new and ongoing research on aqueous pasts, landscapes of disease, ecologies of brick-making, and ways of knowing food, water, air, and land in Lahore, ​​Janakpurdham, Palghar, and beyond. This work will position the city not only as the site of climate’s colonial returns, but also, through empirically informed pedagogies, as the path out of them. Asking how we might bridge classrooms, creative practices, and grounded political action — especially in mahauls of austerity and authoritarianism — the symposium will curate interdisciplinary perspectives and curricula that address changing climates in the region.

Organizer: Nida Rehman (Carnegie Mellon University)

The July 2024 mass uprising in Bangladesh marked a distinct political rupture whose consequences continue to unfold across state and non-state institutions, social lives, and political imaginaries. Emerging from student-led protests and rapidly expanding into a nationwide insurgent movement, the uprising exposed deep fractures in the country’s moral economy, governance structures, and regimes of legitimacy. This symposium brings together transdisciplinary scholarship to examine the uprising not as a singular event but as an ongoing process whose afterlives are reshaping Bangladesh’s political, social, and epistemic futures. The first panel, titled “Moral Economies and Political Imaginaries of Uprising,” situates the uprising within its structural and ideological conditions, examining how economic crisis, elite corruption, and competing political imaginaries converged (or did not converge) to destabilize authoritarian rule. The second panel, titled “Bodies, Affects, and the Social Life of the Uprising,” turns to the embodied and affective dimensions of the upheaval, analyzing how state violence against marked bodies intensified insurgent momentum while also reshaping gendered power, minoritization, and broader patterns of social complacency. The third panel, titled “Reckoning after the Uprising: Wages, Justice, and Digital Power,” addresses the terrain of reckoning after regime change, focusing on labor precarity, demands for transitional justice, cycles of reparation and retribution, and the expanding role of digital media in mediating political power. The final panel, titled “Institutions, Knowledge, and Post-Uprising Futures,” looks forward to institutional and epistemic futures, interrogating struggles over knowledge production, constitutional redesign, and the uncertain prospects of democratic renewal amid risks of backsliding. Taken together, these interventions span political economy, anthropology, sociology, law, and gender studies. The breadth of materials and the need to trace the uprising across multiple registers necessitate a full symposium rather than a single or double panel, enabling transdisciplinary dialogues on the uprising’s complex and still-unfolding afterlives within Bangladesh and beyond.

Organizer: Nafisa Tanjeem (Worcester State University)

This symposium celebrates the formative influence of Sumita Chakravarty’s National Identity in Indian Popular Cinema (1993, 1996) on subsequent studies of Indian cinema. Timed to coincide with the thirtieth anniversary of the publication of its Indian edition from Oxford University Press in 1996, the symposium brings together a multi-generational and international set of scholars across three roundtables. In the first roundtable, scholars assess the impact of the book itself, which drew on a diverse set of frameworks (including postcolonial literary theory, myth and folklore criticism, cultural studies, Film Studies, and histories of South Asian performing arts traditions) and explicated, through thematic criticism and close analysis, the ideational complexity and richness of Indian cinema’s engagement with the nation and national identity. In this way the book introduced India’s sprawling cinematic traditions – especially then-neglected popular cinema – to generations of scholars in the Anglo-American academy, South Asianist and otherwise, in lucid and evocative terms. The second roundtable will feature scholars who will reflect on the extraordinary influence of Chakravarty’s book on their scholarship on Indian regional cinematic traditions, on India’s documentary cinema, on Indian cinema’s relation to world cinema traditions, and on the continuing patterns of this cinema’s complex engagement with popular cultural intertexts. A third roundtable will present new approaches to Indian cinema research, affirming the book’s ongoing relevance and resonance. The symposium will conclude with a conversation with Prof. Sumita Chakravarty, who will be in attendance for the day’s proceedings. The full-day structure is meant to make time to assess the book’s influence and, as per Prof. Chakravarty’s express request, to introduce attendees to exciting new directions in Indian film studies methods, archives, and areas and topics of inquiry.

Organizers: Neepa Majumdar (University of Pittsburgh) and Sudhir Mahadevan (University of Washington)