Presenters

New Attendee Breakfast

Mentorship at the Annual Conference on South Asia

Memorial Form

Panelist Search Board Request

Registration Refund Request

Roommate Board Request

Visa Letter Request Form

Certificate of Participation Request

Panelist Search Board Request Form

Name: Rovel Sequeira
University Institution/Affiliation: University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
Contact: rovelsqr@umich.edu
Name of Panel/ Round Table/ Single Paper: Thinking with Sexology in South Asia: Science at the Boundary
Abstract: This panel mobilizes the semantic compass of the concept “boundary” to rethink the post/colonial and global histories of sexual science in and from South Asia. Dominant accounts of sexology have concentrated on its origins in the Western, primarily German, context as a distinct “Sexualwissenschaft” or institutionalized science of sex. But sexology was often itself a marginal form of knowledge-making that emerged at the edges of more well-established disciplines like biomedicine, psychiatry, anthropology, and zoology in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and itself propelled technologies of endocrinology and eugenics across the globe. Underfunded, overextended, and barely “respectable,” sexology’s portability across disciplines depended on its apparent liminality as a para-scientific idiom—one which could and often did threaten to become a constitutive principle for the organization of those disciplines. In turn, sexology itself partook in the creation of boundaries between global/local, literature/science, language/vernacular, savage/civilized, science/pornography, expert/layperson, normal/deviant, elite/popular, and modernity/premodernity. Recognizing these tensions, recent scholarship like Sexology and Translation (2015) and A Global History of Sexual Science (2018), “Sexology and its Afterlives” (2021), and “The Science of Sex Itself” (2023), as well as more specifically South Asian histories of sexology like “Translating Sex: Locating Sexology in Indian History” (2020), Indian Sex Life (2020) and Sex, Law, and the Politics of Age (2021) have focused on the regional and multi-directional linguistic flows and networked capacities of sexology. Building on the urgency of this scholarship, this panel brings together papers that leverage the unstable status of sexology as a science in and across South Asia.

Panel papers might consider the concept-metaphor of boundary through debates about marginal and marginalized subjects/objects of research within sexology; geography and scale in terms of centers, peripheries, and alternative circulatory nodes; disciplinary boundaries between sexology and allied or antagonistic forms of knowledge; and distinctions between expert and popular modes of sexual knowledge production.

Name: Parvez Rahman
University Institution/Affiliation: Middle Tennessee State University
Contact: mpr3c@mtmail.mtsu.edu
Name of Panel/ Round Table/ Single Paper: Bleeding Memories: Collective Remembrance of Hindu-Muslim Relations on the Bengal Border
Abstract: This panel seeks to discuss oral histories, letters, images, monuments, commemorative landscapes, and the built environment to question dominant narratives about partition and communal division in Bengal. It is typical for partition literature to emphasize the division between religious communities. However, it is important to recognize stories of familial spaces and the complex relationships between Hindus and Muslims, who had coexisted peacefully in Noakhali and Calcutta prior to partition. This is an opportune time to construct new narratives from memories concerning Hindu-Muslim relationships during communal riots and also to interrogate such concepts as nostalgia, home, belongings, and hope. To achieve this, memories will become archives to relearn partition distinct from grand narratives of political parties that failed to bring the voices of marginalized people in either end of Bengal to remember an event that is infinite. The aim of this panel is to discuss memories retrieved from survivors of the riots as well as collective remembering of the second generation. This panel will include various mediums of memory of both Hindu and Muslim communities in Bengal.

Name: Tayeba Batool
University Institution/Affiliation: University of Pennsylvania
Contact: tbatool@sas.upenn.edu
Name of Panel/ Round Table/ Single Paper: Un-Structuring the City: Encounters with Infrastructures, Institutions, and Belonging in Urban South Asia
Abstract: This panel focuses on the “speculative” nature and promises of urban development projects and movements as they affect and are affected by everyday realities and marginalized experiences. It addresses the changing and selective jurisdiction of progress/dispossession, freedom/surveillance, national/local, nature/concrete in “multiple and competing knowledge producing and world making projects” amidst various actors and actions (Björkman 2021, 4).

Instead of seeing the South Asian city shaped by policies alone, “worlding practices of cities” gesture us to the complex assemblages and ontologies of human and nonhuman agencies (McCann, Roy and Ward 2013). For Ong (2011, 12), “worlding” implies taking everyday practices as “constitutive, spatializing, and signifying gestures” that “creatively imagine and shape alternative social visions and configurations (or “worlds”).” It problematizes the ways that mega-infrastructure projects enforce a top-down nationalist understanding of belonging to the city without considering those most impacted and dispossessed in the process and aftermath(Sajjad, Javed 2022). At the same time, to unsettle the urban means to address the ecological and environmental transformations that join equivocal claims and mediations among diverse institutional actors, policy makers, and the broader public.

We invite panelists to consider the politics, practices, and imaginaries of/in urban space(s) to address the structured and spontaneous ways that institutions, infrastructure, development, and belonging shape the city in South Asia. In what ways does the processual nature of cities then help us to observe the quotidian “improvisation” of public spaces (Anjaria 2016) as it comes to confront universals of environmental conservation (Baviskar 2020) and aspirations for modernist plans (Holston 1989; Daeschsel 2011)? How are institutions, infrastructures, memory, and identity claimed and negotiated in everyday narratives and encounters with the urban space?

February 1

• Symposium submission portal opens
• Conference registration opens
• Meal Ticket purchasing opens

March 1

• Symposium submission portal closes – all Symposium submissions due

July 31

• All participants must be registered by July 31st

September 1

• Last day to submit program schedule changes. Changes made after September 1 will not appear in the printed program book (only on the printed addendum)
• Deadline for changing number of participants, requesting receptions/dinners, adjusting Concourse hotel arrangements

September 15

• Registration refund deadline

October 1

• Online registration closes. After October 1st, registration fees must be paid upon arrival to the conference and are $260 (non-student) and $120 (student and emeritus)

February 1

• Panel, Round Table, & Single Paper submission portals open
• Conference registration opens
• Meal Ticket purchasing opens

April 5

• Submission portals close – all submissions due

July 31

• All participants must be registered by July 31st

September 1

• Last day to submit program schedule changes. Changes made after September 1 will not appear in the printed program book (only on the printed addendum)

September 15

• Registration refund deadline

October 1

• Online registration closes. After October 1st, registration fees must be paid upon arrival to the conference

February 1

• Film submissions open (email Conference Coordinator)
• Conference registration opens

June 1

• Film submissions close

September 15

• Ship DVD of film to the Center for South Asia in preparation of screening

February 1

• Association Meeting submission portal opens
• Conference registration opens

September 1

• Association Meeting submission portal closes

Additional information can be found on our Association Meeting web page.

February 1

• Special Event submission portal opens
• Conference registration opens

September 1

• Special Event submission portal closes

September 15

• Deadline to submit additional information and/or changes related to your special event submission

Additional information can be found on our Special Events web page.

If you would like to send additional information regarding your Memorial Submission, please email the ACSA Team directly – conference@southasia.wisc.edu

February 1

• Meal Ticket sales begin
• Conference registration opens

October 1

• Deadline for purchasing Meal Tickets and selecting meal options (meat or vegetarian)

Please note that no Meal Tickets will be for sale during the conference.

Conference attendees who have not purchased their Meal Ticket online before the Oct 1 deadline can find food in the Madison Concourse Hotel, CIRC, located on the first floor of the hotel. You may also use the Restaurant Map provided in your program book to locate restaurants near the conference.