The Politics of Performance: Contesting Caste, Sexuality, and Gender in Contemporary Maharashtra, India
2019-03-06 11:30 - 13:30 (America/New_York)
Prof. Paik’s event is cancelled due to The New School closed due to weather conditions today. We are now hosting her talk from 11:30-1:30 pm on Wednesday, March 6th at India China Institute located on the 9th floor of 66 Fifth Avenue(between 12th and 13th Streets). Lunch will be served. In order to plan properly, please email us at indiachina@newschool.edu and let us know you will still be attending. To RSVP, click here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/updated-venue-the-politics-of-performance-contesting-caste-sexuality-and-gender-in-contemporary-tickets-56670318448 Buy Tickets Buy Tickets on Eventbrite Buy Tickets on Eventbrite

Worldly World Orders: Building on the Legacy of L.H.M. Ling
2019-04-26 12:30 - 19:00 | Starr Foundation Hall, UL102 63 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY, 10011

Rashmi Sadana public talk - Urban Space, Public Spheres: The Delhi Metro in the Imagination and the Everyday
2019-09-25 17:00 - 18:30
RSVP

Political Crises in Hong Kong and Jammu & Kashmir
2019-10-07 18:00 - 20:00 | Starr Foundation Hall, UL102 63 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY, 10011
Register Here

The current crises in Hong Kong and Jammu and Kashmir, though distinct in their historical and political contours, arose when central governments sought to increase sovereign power against the aspirations of many local residents for unrealized autonomy. Public authorities have laid claim to constitutional-legal provisions to support their stances, and have simultaneously resorted to coercion against local opposition. Such actions have prompted widespread international and some domestic condemnation. At the same time, large sections of mainstream media and publics in China and India have offered competing narratives that are generally supportive of the authorities. Please join us for this panel on the two crises and how they juxtapose the challenges of nationalism and liberal democratic norms. Panelists will explore the roots of the conflicts, constitutional questions, the strategies of state authorities and local resistance, the range of domestic and global responses, and prospects for the future.

Ho-fung Hung is the Henry M. & Elizabeth P. Wiesenfeld Professor in Political Economy at the Sociology Department and School of Advanced International Studies of Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of the award-winning book The China Boom: Why China Will Not Rule the World and Protest with Chinese Characteristics: Demonstrations, Riots, and Petitions in the Mid-Qing Dynasty, both published by Columbia University Press. His articles have appeared in American Journal of Sociology, the American Sociological Review, Development and Change, the New Left Review and elsewhere. His analyses of the Chinese and global political economy and Hong Kong politics have been featured or cited in The New York Times, The Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg News, among other publications.

Zha Jianying is a writer, journalist, and cultural commentator in both English and Chinese. She is the author of two books in English, Tide Players: The Movers and Shakers of a Rising China (named “One of the best books of 2011” by The Economist), and China Pop: How Soap Operas, Tabloids and Bestsellers Are Transforming a Culture, and five books of non-fiction and fiction in Chinese. Her work has appeared widely in publications such as The New Yorker, The New York Times, Dushu, and Wanxiang. Tide Players was selected by The Economist as “One of the Best Books of 2011.” A recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, she also has been a regular commentator on current events on Chinese television, and works as the China Representative of the India China Institute at The New School in New York.

Haley Duschinski is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Center for Law, Justice & Culture at Ohio University. She is a legal and political anthropologist with research specializations in law and conflict, militarization and impunity, popular protest, and law and memory in Kashmir. Her research has appeared in journals such as Political and Legal Anthropology Review, Cultural Studies, Race & Class, Memory Studies, Anthropology Today, Interventions, and Anthropological Quarterly. Her current book project is a legal ethnography of how cases relating to securitization and militarization have been contested and adjudicated in the courts of Kashmir. At Ohio University, Professor Duschinski teaches anthropology courses on violence, peace, human rights, and law.

Sandipto Dasgupta is an Assistant Professor of Politics at the New School for Social Research. His research is in the history of modern political and social thought, especially the political theory of empire, decolonization, and postcolonial presents. His book manuscript, Legalizing the Revolution (under contract with Cambridge University Press), reconstructs the institutionalization of nascent postcolonial futures through a historical study of the Indian constitution making experience. He received his PhD in political theory from Columbia University. Before arriving at the New School this fall, he was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University and the British Academy, and taught at Ashoka and Columbia University.

Fifth International Conference on the Unfinished Legacy of Dr. B. R. Ambedkar - Dalits in Global Context: Rethinking Gender and Religion
2019-10-24 - 2019-10-26
RSVP for The Fifth International Conference on Unfinished Legacy of Dr. Ambedkar

From October 24-26, 2019, the New School will host the Fifth International Conference on the Legacy of Dr. B.R. Ambedkar. This year’s conference theme is Dalits in Global Context: Rethinking Gender and Religion.

Ambedkar Conference Agenda Final

5th International Ambedkar Conference Bios

The conference will explore critical issues faced by the Dalit community, with a focus on the intersecting nature of gender, religion, and caste-based discrimination. Since its inception, the Ambedkar Conference has convened various scholars and practitioners, institutions and organizations across the world, creating a space to discuss the politics of equal dignity and equal rights for Dalits. This year, we hope to further this conversation.

While the New School is this year’s host, the conference is a collaboration between the following universities and think tanks:

Brandeis University Barnard College, Columbia University University of Massachusetts, Amherst The Indian Institute of Dalit Studies, India SAMATA Foundation, NepalUniversity of CincinnatiCASTE: a Global Journal on Social Exclusion International Ambedkar Mission, USABoston Study GroupIndia China Institute, The New SchoolJulien Studley Graduate Study Program in International AffairsThe Global Studies Program, The New School

Related Event:

Second Annual Ambedkar Lectures at Columbia University, organized by Anupama Rao

Oct. 17th: Race, Caste, and American Pragmatism

Oct. 18th: Remaking Publics: Gender, Affect, Insurgence, Presence

Other Related Events:

Workshop (invite-only) on Dalits in Global Context: Rethinking Religion and Gender Sponsored by The Henry Luce Foundation

From October 21-24, 2019, the India China Institute at The New School is hosting a focused workshop along the theme of the conference. The primary goal of the workshop is to convene an invited group of Global Dalit Change-makers — young and emerging scholars from within and outside of the Dalit community who are already working at the junction of gender, religion, caste, and social justice. ICI will also invite established scholars and practitioners in the field to help inspire the workshop with intellectual rigor, deep critical inquiry, and innovative practices.

This will be a new kind of conversation— the first workshop of its kind outside of South Asia, one that combines scholarship and activism, and strengthens conversations between scholars and practitioners when analyzing caste-based discrimination. The selected group of workshop participants will then join the Ambedkar Conference at the New School, where they will present their work.

100 Years of New

2019 marks The New School’s centennial year, and thus provides an opportunity to reflect not only on the university’s history of critical social inquiry, but also the early days of the school’s founding. B.R. Ambedkar, while a student at Columbia University, studied under one of The New School’s co-founders, John Dewey, and was greatly influenced by him. The Ambedkar Conference is an opportunity for the New School to convene individuals who are writing and researching in the New School’s spirit of creative and critical scholarship, and who, more than anything, are training their gazes on a future we’ll soon inhabit.

The Bluestone Rising Scholars Prize

Brandeis University, original convener of the International Conference on the Unfinished Legacy of Dr. B.R. Ambedkar, awarded inaugural Bluestone Rising Scholar Prizes to two early career scholars, to be published in CASTE: A Global Journal on Social Exclusion. The prize recipients will take part in an Award Ceremony at Brandeis University, and then join the International Conference at The New School.

More Conference Information:

Information for Call for Papers

Call for Papers

I am born a Hindu, but I will not die a Hindu, for that is in my power.

B. R. Ambedkar, Yeola Conference, Maharashtra, India, 193

The most problematic aspect of Hindutva is the issue of the treatment of lower castes and tribes. It’s not only that you can ignore some people, but that you identify who it is that you can ignore.

Amartya Sen, Harvard University Interview in The Hindu, Feb. 28, 2019

According to the International Dalit Solidarity Network, “caste discrimination is one of the biggest human rights violations facing the international community today; both in terms of the numbers affected and the severity of the human rights violations caused by this form of discrimination.” The caste system is one of the most brutal forms of hierarchical social organization and caste-based discrimination affects over 250 million people in South Asia and across the globe. Dalits, that is, the “former Untouchables” are on the lowest rung of the Hindu social structure and South Asian society. Despite some increased legal protections in caste-affected countries within and without South Asia, the Dalit community continues to face indignities ranging from daily humiliations, to extreme poverty and servitude, to violence and murder. These indignities are still largely shaped by understandings and practices of religion and underlying notions of purity and impurity as determined by birth and exacerbated by gender relations. For the Dalit community, the entrenched caste system sanctions a massive denial of citizenship and fundamental rights which others enjoy under the constitutions of countries in South Asia.

During this conference, we aim to address issues or questions related to the theme of religion, caste, gender and social justice in or comparative to the South Asian context. These questions might include some of the following:

How can we rethink and reimagine established and emerging debates concerning these issues on methodologies, research, policies, and trans-boundary collaborations?

How have the hierarchies of gender and sexuality affected and been transformed by Dalit women and men?

What are the personal and political actions that Dalit women and men have taken to negotiate with patriarchy, both inside and outside the Dalit community?

How do we engage with Dalit women’s lives at the intersections of gender, caste, class, and religion?

How have Dalits used practice and faith to claim dignity and build solidarity? How have they expressed their experiences and aspirations in literary and other art forms to resist injustice and inhumanity?

In what ways have Dalit women (and men) carved out a new transnational political space to imagine a brighter future?

How can we analyze the intersections of caste and religion beyond Hinduism, for example in Islam, Christianity, Buddhism or Sikhism, specifically in South Asia?

For more information about Dalit issues, please visit:

International Dalit Solidarity Network

Indian Institute of Dalit Studies

SAMATA Foundation

Fueling Revolution: Carbon Technocracy in the Early People's Republic of China
2019-11-14 17:00 - 18:30
RSVP: Fueling Revolution

Victor Seow is a historian of technology, industry, and the environment. His research interests revolve around questions of how technological developments intersect with economic life and environmental change in the making and unmaking of industrial society. Geographically, he focuses on East Asia, which, in the modern era, witnessed monumental transformations across its vast expense and multiple environments as regimes that ranged from imperialist to socialist pursued industrial expansion through heavily technological means. His research sets out to map the contours of those transformations in the past that gave rise to outcomes with which the region still grapples in the present, from despoiled environments to divided societies. At the same time, his work situates East Asia within a global frame and seeks to show how attention to East Asian experiences may sharpen historical and contemporary understandings of technology and the environment in our modern world.

Seow is currently finishing his first book, Carbon Technocracy: Energy Regimes in Modern East Asia, which explores how coal resources and mining technologies shaped Chinese and Japanese experiences with global industrial modernity. Centered on the Fushun colliery in Manchuria, which once boasted the largest coal mining operations in Asia, this project examines how the various Chinese and Japanese regimes that had at different times owned and operated the Fushun coal mines became committed to large-scale, state-led energy extraction amidst concerns over economic growth, resource scarcity, and national autarky. Pivotal to this process was the development and deployment of technologies of extraction: from methods such as open-pit mining and shale oil distillation that enabled the extraction of carbon energy to mechanisms such as fingerprinting and calorie counting that allowed for the extraction of the human labor undergirding the entire enterprise. Grounded in a range of Chinese and Japanese sources, including engineering students’ practicum reports, workers’ oral histories, and the personal papers of mining managers, this project uncovers links between the intensification of coal extraction and the rise of technocratic governance in transwar East Asia, ultimately contributing to interdisciplinary debates about the relationship between energy and the state.

Other ongoing projects include a history of scientific management in China and an environmental history of Chinese innovation as well as two collaborative projects: one on Mr. Science in May Fourth China and beyond (with Sean Hsiang-lin Lei) and the other on technologies of production in East Asian history (with Dagmar Schäfer).

At Harvard, Seow offers or will be offering courses in the history of modern science and technology in East Asia, the history of the factory, and the history of technology and capitalism.

Born and raised in Singapore, Seow received his B.A. in History and Political Science from McGill University and his Ph.D. in History and East Asian Languages from Harvard University. Before joining the Harvard faculty in 2017, he was an Assistant Professor of History at Cornell University.

(Watch Video) Exemplars in Global Health? Comparing Asia’s Many Responses to COVID 19
2020-11-12 09:00 - 10:30 | Online
Watch again HERE:

Even as the COVID 19 pandemic continues to be marked by ebbs and flows, a handful of countries in Asia have had relatively sustained success in curtailing morbidity and mortality due to the virus. No single reason – such as regime type, surveillance technology, or experience with past epidemics – seems to explain these countries’ comparative achievements. This panel will bring together experts from different states including Japan, Vietnam, China, and South Korea. The juxtaposition of these national experiences will aim to illuminate the constellation of historical, political, infrastructural and other factors that undergird competent public health responses.

Yanzhong HuangSenior Fellow for Global Health, Council on Foreign Relations, and Professor and Director of Global Health Studies at Seton Hall University’s School of Diplomacy and International Relations

Pan Suk KimProfessor of Global Public Administration, Yonsei University

Todd PollackCountry Director, The Partnership for Health Advancement in Vietnam and Assistant Professor of Medicine, Harvard Medical School

Kazuto SuzukiProfessor of International Politics, Graduate School of Public Policy, The University of Tokyo

Manjari Mahajan (moderator)Associate Professor of International Affairs and Co-Director, India China Institute, New School University

Thursday, November 129:00-10:30am EST/7:30pm New Delhi/10:00pm Beijing

CHINA Town Hall: Health & Climate
2020-11-18 19:00 - 21:00 | Online
Join the India China Institute (ICI) for a two-part CHINA Town Hall on Wednesday, November 18, at 7:00-9:00pm EST.

Confronting the global challenges of climate change and communicable disease cannot be achieved by any single country, but must be met by constructive cooperation among nations. Although the United States and China will compete in many areas, it is imperative they join forces to face these universal problems that affect global stability and endanger the world’s most vulnerable people.

1. The first event is a panel from 7:00-8:00pm EST on Health and Climate in China, sponsored by the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations. Margaret Hamburg (National Academy of Medicine), Ryan Hass (Brookings Institution), and Angel Hsu (Yale-National University of Singapore) will consider the roles of the United States and China in addressing these two major transnational issues. The conversation will be moderated by Merit Janow (Columbia University School of International and Public Affairs).

Read More

2. Following the panel discussion, at 8:00-9:00pm EST ICI will host a talk by Jennifer Turner, Director of the Wilson Center’s China Environment Forum, titled “Same Bed, Different Dreams: Is There a Path to Revive U.S.-China Climate and Environmental Relations?”

Discussant:

Jennifer Turner has served as Director of the Wilson Center’s China Environment Forum for nearly two decades. She is a widely-quoted expert on U.S.-China environmental cooperation as well as climate-related challenges and governance issues facing the world’s most populous country. As head of the Center’s Global Choke Point multimedia reporting initiative, Turner has worked to combine on-the-ground research with visual storytelling on water-energy-food nexus issues in China, India, Mexico, South Africa, and the United States. She and her team are currently focusing heavily on U.S.-China climate actions, ocean plastic innovation in China and Indonesia, and Chinese distant fishing fleets. Her favorite new project is creating an educational video game on ocean plastics together with the Wilson Center’s Serious Games Initiative. Check out her work at www.wilsoncenter.org and blogs at www.newsecuritybeat.org.

Moderator:

Mark Frazier is Professor of Politics at The New School, where he also serves as Co-Director of the India China Institute. His research interests focus on labor and social policy in China, and more recently on political conflict over urbanization, migration, and citizenship in China and India. His latest book, The Power of Place: Contentious Politics in Twentieth Century Shanghai and Bombay (Cambridge University Press, 2019), examines long-term changes in political geographies and patterns of popular protest in the two cities. He is also the author of Socialist Insecurity: Pensions and the Politics of Uneven Development in China (Cornell University Press, 2010), The Making of the Chinese Industrial Workplace (Cambridge University Press, 2002), and Co-Editor of the SAGE Handbook of Contemporary China (2018). He has authored op-ed pieces and essays for The New York Times, Daedalus, and The Diplomat.

If you encounter technical difficulties during the ICI webinar, you may view the first panel via the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations, then return to this webinar for the discussion with Dr. Turner, beginning at 8:00 p.m. If you have questions about registering or problems with your link, please contact ICI at indiachina@newschool.edu.

Explore additional events in the 2020 CHINA Town Hall series

(Watch Video) China Made: the techno-politics, materialities, and legacies of infrastructure development
2021-02-10 10:00 - 11:30 | Online
The China Made project seeks to build an innovative research agenda for an infrastructural approach in the China Studies field. We approach infrastructure as both an empirically rich material object of research and an analytical strategy for framing research questions and approaches that help us explore more nuanced realms of techno-politics, everyday life, and spatio-temporal change in contemporary and historical China. In this panel, we focus on four key arenas of inquiry: the infrastructural state, infrastructure space, temporalities of infrastructure, and the everyday. Overall, we draw from two broad strands of inquiry in developing our approach. These include, first, recent efforts to rethink the materiality of infrastructures not as an inert or relatively stable basis upon which more dynamic social processes emerge and develop, but rather as unstable assemblages of human and nonhuman agencies. Second, we draw on work that explores the often hidden (techno)political dimensions of infrastructures, through which certain intended and unintended outcomes emerge less from the realms of “policy” and “implementation” and more from the material dispositions and effects of infrastructural formations themselves. These strands of inquiry are brought together as part of our effort to recognize that the infrastructural basis of China’s approach to development and statecraft deserves a more concerted theorizing of infrastructure than what we have seen in the China Studies field thus far.

Speakers:

Timothy Oakes: Professor of Geography and Director of the Center for Asian Studies University of Colorado Boulder.Alessandro Rippa: Associate Professor of Chinese Studies Tallinn University.Darren Byler: Postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Asian Studies University of Colorado Boulder.Dorothy Tang: Doctoral student at MIT’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning.
