India China Institute

Live Baccarat Calculations: Macau Machine Gaming and the Production of the Post-Socialist Subject
2017-10-05 17:30 - 19:30 (America/New_York) | Klein Conference Room, 66 West 12th Street 5th Floor, New York, NY, 10011, USA
Following Portugal’s return of Macau to the People’s Republic of China in 1999, the local government liberalized the city’s 150-year-old casino monopoly concession and invited participation by select foreign gaming companies. Over the following decade these companies produced a phantasmagoric Macau cityscape comprised of enormous integrated casino resorts such as the Venetian, Parisian, Wynn, MGM, and City of Dreams. As a result, tiny Macau is now the world’s most lucrative site of casino gaming, and is visited by more than 30 million tourists per year. The majority of Macau’s casino revenues are derived from Chinese high-rollers who gamble in private VIP rooms. However, due to a recent slowdown of China’s economy, as well as a central government crackdown on corruption and tightening of illicit cross-border financial flows, Macau’s VIP gambling revenues have decreased significantly. Therefore, Macau’s gaming operators are seeking to diversify the industry and to target Chinese ‘mass market’ tourists. This paper analyzes an electronic casino game called LIVE Baccarat, which was specifically created for the Macau market and designed to appeal to ordinary Chinese gamblers. Drawing on the work of Michel Callon and Michel Foucault, I explore the ways in which the LIVE Baccarat gaming machine ‘economizes’ the casino game of baccarat by introducing novel betting functions which require gamblers to engage in various forms of financial calculation. LIVE Baccarat may be understood as an apparatus, or dispositif, of subjection of a Chinese ‘mass market’ gambler – an individuated, speculating, calculating, and risk-taking subject, and a form of ‘human capital’ that Foucault might call an ‘entrepreneur of the self’. This nascent Chinese economic subject is not only important to Macau’s gaming industry, but to post-socialist market reforms in the PRC, and perhaps ultimately to the sustainability of global capitalism.This is an India China Institute event, co-sponsored by the School of Design Strategies, Parsons School of Design, and the Global Studies Program, The New School
RSVP Here:

Welfare, Work, And Poverty: Social Assistance in China W/ Qin Gao
2017-10-12 16:00 - 17:30
Welfare, Work, And Poverty

Talk by Professor Qin Gao

October 12, 2017 | 4:00-5:30 pmHirshon Suite | 55 W 13th St NY New York NY 10011

Welfare, Work, and Poverty, Professor Qin Gao’s new book, provides the first systematic and comprehensive evaluation of the impacts and effectiveness of China’s primary social assistance program — Minimum Livelihood Guarantee, or Dibao — since its inception in 1993. Dibao serves the dual function of providing a basic safety net for the poor and maintaining social and political stability. Despite currently being the world’s largest welfare program in terms of population coverage, evidence on Dibao’s performance has been lacking. This book offers important new empirical evidence and draws policy lessons that are timely and useful for both China and beyond. Welfare, Work, and Poverty is essential reading for political scientists, economists, sociologists, public policy researchers, and social workers interested in learning about and understanding contemporary China.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Qin Gao is a professor at the Columbia School of Social Work (CSSW), a faculty affiliate of the Columbia Population Research Center and of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, and the director of Columbia University’s China Center for Social Policy. She is also an Academic Board Member of the China Institute for Income Distribution at Beijing Normal University and a Public Intellectual Fellow of the National Committee on United States-China Relations. Before joining the CSSW faculty, she was a professor and the Coordinator of International Initiatives at Fordham University’s Graduate School of Social Service. Dr. Gao’s current research examines the following topics: 1) the Chinese welfare state in transition: size, structure, and redistributive effects; 2) effectiveness and impacts of dibao, China’s primary social assistance program, and other anti-poverty policies and programs; 3) gender inequality in time use in China and beyond; 4) social protection for rural-to-urban migrants in China and Asian American immigrants; and 5) cross-national comparative social policies and programs. Dr. Gao’s work has been supported by multiple national and international funding sources such as the National Social Science Fund of China, UNICEF, and the World Bank.

LIMITED SEATING

Reversing Roles? Environmental Politics and Policy in China and the US in the Trump and Xi Jingping Era w/ Robert Gottlieb
2017-10-18 18:00 - 20:00
Reversing Roles?

Environmental Politics and Policy in China and the US in the Trump and Xi Jingping Era

A book talk by Professor Robert Gottlieb

October 18, 2017 | 6:00-8:00 pm

Orozco Room (712), 66 W. 12th St

RSVP Now

About the Talk

Has there been a role reversal between the US and China on the environment?

China has long been considered an environmental outlier — horrendous smog episodes, water unfit to drink and even to irrigate, huge increases in the number of cars on the road, a global leader in the use of pesticides, a major coal producer and importer, a reluctant participant in global climate negotiations until recently, and more. The US, until November 9, had been seen as at least modestly responsive to environmental concerns. Now with Donald Trump and Scott Pruitt ensconced in Washington seeking to systematically dismantle the environmental policy system in contrast to the passage of environmental legislation and a new role around climate change in China, the roles do seem to be reversing. Is that an accurate view?

The answer is yes and no. The talk will compare current US and China environmental approaches in such areas as air pollution, transportation, and food as well as climate change, and the interplay between national and local or regional government policies and their implementation. It will point to the role of social movements and popular protests to help us understand what has changed and why. And it will look at the structural barriers for change: the nature of China’s embrace of marketization, developmentalism, and urbanization on the one hand, and the continuing power of the fossil fuel industry and other environmentally problematic industry forces in the U.S. to shape or at least block policies.

About the Speaker

Robert Gottlieb is Emeritus Professor at Occidental College and founder and former executive director of the Urban & Environmental Policy Institute. He is the author or co-author of more than a dozen books; his most recent book, co-authored with Simon Ng, is Global Cities: Urban Environments in Los Angeles, Hong Kong, and China (MIT Press).

Sponsored by The New School’s interdisciplinary programs in Global Studies, Urban Studies, and Environmental Studies, and the India China Institute.

Reimagining Youth and Politics in India w/Shehla Rashid
2017-10-23 18:30 - 20:00
Reimagining Youth and Politics in India

Talk by Shehla Rashid

October 23, 2017 | 6:30-8:00 pmKellen Auditorium (#101) | 66 Fifth Avenue, NY, The New School

About the Talk

Shehla Rashid represents one of the most important voices in the anti-fascist struggles in India. She was the Vice President of the Jawaharlal Nehru University Student Union and a member of the All India Student Association. She is currently finishing a MPhil in Law and Governance at JNU.

A 2016 interview with Rashid for The Wire.

A 2016 video of Rashid giving a speech on campus at JNU.

LIMITED SEATING

Religious Change and Disturbed Religious Ecosystems in Jiangsu, China w/ Robert Weller
2017-10-26 16:00 - 18:00
Religious Change and Disturbed Religious Ecosystems in Jiangsu, China

Talk by Professor Robert Weller

October 26, 2017 | 4:00-6:00 pmOrozco Room (#712) | 66 W. 12th St, NY, The New School

About the Talk

Rapid urban expansion in wealthy parts of China has led to the resettlement of many villagers into high-rise buildings, making earlier forms of material and cultural life impossible. At the same time, large-scale urban reconstruction has displaced many old city neighborhoods. One result is that the territorially-based religion described in much of the anthropological and historical literature has become increasingly untenable as the entire ecosystem surrounding it has grown unstable. This talk examines what appears to be an especially creative zone for religious innovation: the expanding urban edge. The cases come from various cities in southern Jiangsu and focus on ghost attacks, a spirit medium network, and innovations in the forms and objects of temple worship. Theoretically, the paper thinks about ecosystems in the broadest sense of complexly articulated systems, without assuming a divide between nature and culture.

About the Speaker

Robert Weller is Professor of Anthropology & Director of Graduate Studies at Boston University. Weller’s work concentrates on China and Taiwan in comparative perspective. His actual research topics, however, are eclectic—running from ghosts to politics, rebellions to landscape paintings. Perhaps what unites everything is an interest in finding the limits to authority in all its settings. His publications include Unities and Diversities in Chinese Religion (1987), Resistance, Chaos, and Control in China: Taiping Rebels, Taiwanese Ghosts and Tiananmen (1994), Alternate Civilities: Chinese Culture and the Prospects for Democracy (1999), Discovering Nature: Globalization and Environmental Culture in China and Taiwan (2006), and Ritual and Its Consequences: An Essay on the Limits of Sincerity (2008).

LIMITED SEATING

Media Politics in China: Improvising Power Under Authoritarianism
2017-11-03 16:00 - 18:00
Media Politics in China: Improvising Power Under Authoritarianism

A CESIC Talk with Maria Repnikova

November 3, 2017 | 4:00-6:00 pmKlein Conference Room (#501) | 66 W. 12th St, NY, The New School

About the Talk

Who watches over the party-state? In her new book, Maria Repnikova reveals the webs of an uneasy partnership between critical journalists and the state in China. More than merely a passive mouthpiece or a dissident voice, the media in China also plays a critical oversight role, one more frequently associated with liberal democracies than with authoritarian systems. Chinese central officials cautiously endorse media supervision as a feedback mechanism, as journalists carve out space for critical reporting by positioning themselves as aiding the agenda of the central state. Drawing on rare access in the field, Media Politics in China examines the process of guarded improvisation that has definedthis volatile partnership over the past decade on a routine basis and in the aftermath of major crisis events. Combined with a comparative analysis of media politics in the Soviet Union and contemporary Russia, the book highlights the distinctiveness of Chinese journalist-state relations, as well as the renewed pressures facing them in the Xi era.

About the Speaker

Dr. Maria Repnikova is a scholar of global communication, with a comparative focus on China and Russia. Her research examines the processes of political resistance and persuasion in illiberal political contexts, drawing on ethnographic research approaches and extensive time in the field. Maria holds a doctorate from the University of Oxford, where she was a Rhodes Scholar.

LIMITED SEATING

The 19th Congress of the Chinese Communist Party and the Futures of Chinese Politics
2017-12-04 16:00 - 18:00
The 19th Congress of the Chinese Communist Party and the Futures of Chinese Politics

December 4, 2017 | 4:00-6:00 pmOrozco Room (712) | 66 W. 12th St, NY, The New School

A Public Talk with Andrew Nathan Columbia University | Hua Ze China Rights in Action | L.H.M. Ling The New School | Mark Frazier The New School | Xu Youyu Chinese Academy of Social Sciences | Zha Jianying Writer

About the Talk

As the now undisputed, strong leader of modern China, Xi Jinping is uniquely positioned to determine China’s future. Through his emphasis on the ‘Belt and Road’ Initiative, (BRI), Xi demonstrates his intention for China to shape the contours of global affairs as well.

At the 19th Party Congress, Xi Jinping’s ideas on China’s development and role in global affairs were incorporated in the Party’s Constitution. With only five years in office, Xi has attained a level of personalized power and authority not seen in China in decades. But will Xi’s supremacy go unchallenged in the future? What are the prospects for political change in China under Xi’s self-stated “New Era of Socialism with Chinese Characteristics”. A panel of China experts will discuss these and related questions about China following the 19th Party Congress.

About the Book

This panel on China’s multiple political futures is being held in connection with the recent publication of To Build a Free China: A Citizen’s Journey (Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2017) by Xu Zhiyong, a former ICI fellow, and translated by Joshua Rosenzweig and Yaxue Cao.

Dr. Xu is a prominent legal scholar, civil rights lawyer, activist, and founder of the New Citizens’ Movement. He was named one of Asia Weekly’s People of the Year in 2005 and one of the Southern People’s Weekly Top Ten Young Leaders of China in 2006. He was an ICI Fellow from 2008 to 2010. Professor Andrew Nathan, who wrote the introduction of the book, will share his thoughts and insights on the specific questions explored by Xu Zhiyong.

This event is organized in partnership with Columbia University’s Weatherhead East Asian Institute and co-sponsored by The New School’s Global Studies Program and the Julien J. Studley Graduate Program in International Affairs.

Agrarian Elites in Urban Real Estate: Urban and Land Transformations along New Economic Corridors in Liberalizing India
2018-03-05 16:00 - 18:00
Professor Sai Balakrishnan will be exploring the narrative movements of urbanization in contemporary India from megacities to the contested geographies along new economic corridors. As policymakers search for new market-oriented means for the transfer of land from agrarian constituencies to infrastructural promoters and urban developers, the re-allocation of property control is erupting into volatile land-based social conflicts. Professor Balakrishnan puts forward the argument that some of India’s most decisive conflicts over its urban futures will unfold in these corridor regions where electorally strong agrarian propertied classes are coming into direct encounters with financially powerful incoming urban firms. She calls for new theories of land and urbanization that are capable of incorporating within them the agrarian political economy. Through focusing on the agrarian to urban land-use change along India’s first economic corridor, the Mumbai-Pune Expressway, she articulates how diverse agrarian property regimes shape the trajectories of contemporary urbanization in liberalizing India.An India China Institute public event. RSVP here to register for the event.

Xi Jinping and China's Success Trap
2018-04-02 17:30 - 19:00
Drawing on Professor Mohanty’s more than three decades of research, this talk will focus on how China’s “reform and open door” policy evolved and helped achieve tremendous economic success. Professor Mohanty will also examine how this policy has generated serious social and environmental problems.

In his recent book, ‘China’s Transformation: The Success Story and the Success Trap’, Mohanty argues that the consequences of this story of success and growth are so strong that it has been difficult for China to change its main development path and to achieve a desirable level of equity and sustainability. Professor Mohanty describes this as the “success trap” that China is currently grappling with.

This event is organized by the India China Institute and co-sponsored by the Global Studies Program at The New School

LIMITED SEATING

The China-Pakistan Economic Corridor: Prospects, Perceptions, and Potential Implications for India and the US
2018-04-05 17:30 - 19:00 | Klein Conference Room, 66 West 12th Street 5th Floor, New York, NY, 10011, USA
The China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) is a $62 billion infrastructure project associated with Beijing’s broader Belt and Road Initiative. It entails new roads, power plants, and ports across Pakistan as part of China’s global effort to facilitate access to markets far and wide. CPEC has the potential to bring major benefits to Pakistan’s economy, but because of security and financial issues, it is also fraught with risk. This lecture will examine CPEC’s prospects; discuss how it is perceived in Pakistan, China, India, and the US; and consider its strategic implications for both New Delhi and Washington.

Michael Kugelman is the Asia Program Deputy Director and Senior Associate for South Asia at the Woodrow Wilson Center, where he is responsible for research, programming, and publications on the region. His main speciality is Pakistan, India, and Afghanistan and U.S. relations with each of them. Kugelman writes monthly columns for Foreign Policy’s South Asia Channel and monthly commentaries for War on the Rocks. He also contributes regular pieces to the Wall Street Journal’s Think Tank blog. He has published op-eds and commentaries in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Politico, CNN.com, Bloomberg View, The Diplomat, Al Jazeera, and The National Interest, among others.

LIMITED SEATING

Global Asia and Postcolonial Predicaments: How to Historicize the Rohingya Crisis
2018-04-09 18:30 - 20:00 | Klein Conference Room, 66 West 12th Street 5th Floor, New York, NY, 10011, USA
The horrors suffered by Rohingyas in Myanmar today – which now appear ever more frequently and graphically in the news — represent one brutal extremity of a kind of victimization that haunts countless people whose only crime is living in old spaces of human mobility that modern empires carved into national territories. Methodological nationalism justifies their precarity with histories that provide charters for national belonging, tying citizens firmly to specific places inside national borders. In a world covered by nations, human rights depend on that belonging. Old spaces of mobility can thus become perilous homelands where nations produce minorities as aliens eligible for marginalization, exclusion, and expulsion. Histories of mobile social space may implicitly disenfranchise their residents, but we need those histories to escape methodological nationalism and explore interactions of mobility and territoriality that generate globalization, at many levels of scale. All these post-colonial predicaments challenge any history of the Rohingya crisis, which I approach here through local histories of Global Asia around the Bay of Bengal.The “Carol Breckenridge Memorial Lecture Series in South Asian History” is an annual lecture by a distinguished scholar in the field of South Asian history and society, broadly defined. It was established with the generous support of Professor Arjun Appadurai, the former Provost of The New School. The lecture series has featured diverse vantage points on South Asian history and different generations of scholars, including Sir Christopher Bayly, Gayatri Spivak, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Faisal Devji, and Ritu Birla.

David Ludden is Professor and Chair in the Department of History at New York University. He received his Ph.D. in History from the University of Pennsylvania, in 1978, and served on the Penn faculty from 1981 until 2007, when he came to NYU. He has directed South Asia programs at Penn, the Social Science Research Council, the Fulbright Senior Scholars program (CIES), and NYU. He served as President of the Association for Asian Studies in 2002-3. His research focuses on very long-term histories of globalization in Asia, particularly as they concern trajectories of capitalist economic development, spatial inequity, natural environments, and changing material conditions in everyday life.

LIMITED SEATING

Urban Futures in the Indian Himalayas
2018-04-18 18:30 - 19:30
The expanded reproduction of rural livelihoods has led to an increasing number of households in the Indian Himalayas—especially in the state of Himachal Pradesh—route available surplus to nearby urban areas in search of speculative footholds. This talk is about the production of space and everyday lives concomitant to this process.Rohit Negi is with the School of Human Ecology at Ambedkar University, Delhi. He has a PhD in Geography (Ohio State) and masters degree in Urban Planning (UIUC). Rohit’s research lies at the intersections of urban geography and political ecology, and his ongoing projects concern Delhi’s toxic air, and Himachal’s construction boom.

LIMITED SEATING

The Promise of Making: Desiring Alternatives and Hacking Entrepreneurial Living in China
2018-04-23 16:00 - 18:00
Since 2014, a series of Western media outlets from the Wired UK over the Economist to Forbes has begun to celebrate the city of Shenzhen in the South of China as a rising hub of innovation, a so-called “Hollywood for Makers” and “Silicon Valley of Hardware.” These media stories took up an idea that open source hardware advocates had been promoting for several years: that the city of Shenzhen had become crucial for the realization of one of the key promises of the maker movement, i.e. to prototype concrete alternatives to the pitfalls of the information society and contemporary capitalism. Just a couple years earlier, Shenzhen was largely known as a place of copycats and fakes that lacked creativity where ideas created elsewhere were simply executed and mass produced. What happened within the timespan of only a few years that changed Shenzhen’s image from demonstrating China’s continuous lag in technology innovation towards a place where alternatives to neoliberal capitalism could be prototyped?In this talk, Silvia Lindtner presents excerpts from her forthcoming book “The Promise of Making”, unpacking the historical contingencies of this transformation of Shenzhen, and with it China, in the global tech imaginary. Drawing from more than seven years of ethnographic research, she shows how the displacement of techno-optimistic onto Shenzhen unfolded through and alongside the emergence of “making” as a mode of intervention in the status-quo by hacking not only machines but also markets and work itself. Shenzhen, as the speaker shows, was rendered by open source hardware advocates, venture capitalists, avant-garde designers, and Chinese politicians and state actors alike as a laboratory to prototype what she calls “entrepreneurial living,” i.e. a naturalization of experimentation as a mode of “living on” amidst a pervasive economization of life. While making reformulated a key neoliberal logic of self-economization as a story of empowerment by promising to include ever more people in its call for self-transformation into human capital, Shenzhen came to be seen as the place to accomplish this upgrade of the self and to regain a sense of control amidst anxieties over the economic and environmental crisis.

Silvia Lindtner is an assistant professor at the University of Michigan in the School of Information, with a courtesy appointment in the Penny W. Stamps School of Art and Design. Lindtner’s research and teaching interests include innovation and technology entrepreneurship, making and hacking cultures, shifts in digital work, labor, industry, policy, and governance. This work unfolds through a deep engagement with issues of gender, inequality, and enactments of masculinity in engineering and computer science fields, politics and transnational imaginaries of design, contemporary political economy, and processes of economization. Lindtner draws from more than eight years of multi-sited ethnographic research, with a particular focus on China’s shifting role in transnational and global tech production alongside research alongside research in the United States, Taiwan, and Africa.

LIMITED SEATING

High-Speed Urbanization and the “Over-sized Cities” in Contemporary China
2018-05-04 16:00 - 18:00 | Wolff Conference Room, 6 East 16th Street, New York, NY, 10003, USA
High-Speed Urbanization and the “Over-sized Cities” in Contemporary China

May 4, 2018 | 4:00-6:00 pmStarr Foundation Hall | 63 Fifth Ave, NY, The New School

A Public Talk with Zhe Sun, Shanghai University of Finance and Economics(S.U.F.E)

About the Talk

The urbanization rate in China has passed 50% since 2011 and will reach 60% by the year 2020. However, the image of “rural China” stays as a stereotype for a long time.

This talk is aimed to help understand China in urban condition. It will start from the process of high-speed urbanization in the first decade of 21st century. Then it will demonstrate the high- density situation in three megacities: Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou. Finally, it will emphasize the current u-turn of urban policy from social inclusion to social exclusion in the so-called “over-sized” cities and point out the latest inequality issues in the case of Shanghai.

About the Speaker

Dr. Zhe SUN is an assistant researcher in the department of economic sociology at Shanghai University of Finance and Economics(S.U.F.E). He achieved his PhD in E.N.S Paris-Saclay with a French dissertation on the housing market and homeowner society in Shanghai. Now he is studying the rental housing market, tenants groups as well as other relevant urban issues such as the informal economy, gentrification and gated-community etc.

This event is organized by the India China Institute and co-sponsored by The New School’s Global Studies Program and Environmental Studies Program.

LIMITED SEATING

India China Day 2018
2018-09-20 17:30 - 19:30 | Lang Cafe, 65 West 11th Street First Fl., New York, NY, 10011, USA
Come check out the India China Institute’s India China Day!

Airing Grievances and the Atmospherics of Chinese Legal Reform - Julie Chu
2018-11-02 16:00 - 18:00
The India China Institute (ICI) at The New School is pleased to announce another event as part of our ongoing Colloquium on the Economies and Societies of India and China (CESIC).

Airing Grievances and the Atmospherics of Chinese Legal Reform

Professor Julie Chu, University of Chicago

Friday, Nov 2, 2018 (4:00-6:00 pm) | Orozco Room (#712), 66 W. 12th St.

RSVP Now

About the Talk

This talk considers the ways in which legal reform unfolds as a palpable, if vague, “change in the air” in new zones of urban revitalization and port development in contemporary China. Drawing from various examples of air’s tactile circulation through the rezoned areas of coastal Fuzhou (e.g., the free trade port area, the touristic city center), I show how redevelopment as filtered through “the rule of law” still politically and literally stinks for those caught up in its environs. But against instrumental readings of the dysfunctions and failures of China’s recent legal reforms, my aim is to explore how “the law” actually works through its very malfunctions and spread of bad airs to shape a distinctive atmospherics of protest in citizen-state encounters; this includes gathering unlikely allies together under a shared cloud of political disaffection and procedural noise to ponder the revolutionary and everyday possibilities of social change beyond the governing logics of “reform.”

About the Speaker

Julie Y. Chu is a sociocultural anthropologist with interests in mobility and migration, economy and value, ritual life, material culture, media and technology, and state regulatory regimes. Her book, Cosmologies of Credit: Transnational Mobility and the Politics of Destination in China (Duke University Press, 2010), received the 2011 Sharon Stephens Prize from the American Ethnological Society and the 2012 Clifford Geertz Prize from the Society for the Anthropology of Religion. Her current writing project is entitled The Hinge of Time: Infrastructure and Chronopolitics at China’s Global Edge. Based on three years of fieldwork largely among Chinese customs inspectors and transnational migrant couriers, this work will analyze the various infrastructures in place (legal-rational, financial, cosmic, piratical) for managing the temporal intensities and rhythms of people and things on the move between Southern China and the United States. A graduate of NYU’s Program in Culture and Media, she is also currently completing video projects related to her fieldwork as well as developing a new ethnographic focus on Chinese soundscapes, especially in relation to the changing qualities and valuations of the Chinese concept of renao (热闹, a bustling scene, social liveliness or, literally, “heat and noise”).

Selected Publications

n.d.
The Hinge of Time: Infrastructure and Chronopolitics at China’s Global Edge (book manuscript in progress).

n.d.
Leaving Longyan, ethnographic film in production.

n.d.
Debt, Theft and the Calculus of Fortune (in preparation for publication).

n.d.
Schlock Value: Or, How Some Chinese Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Politics of Fiasco (in preparation for journal submission).

2017
Risk, Fate, Fortune: The Lives and Times of Customs Inspectors in Southern China. Cambridge University Press.

2016
Boxed In: Human Cargo and the Dis/comforts of Moving Strangers. International Journal of Politics, Culture & Society.

2014
When Infrastructures Attack: The Workings of Disrepair in China. American Ethnologist 14 (2): 351-367.

2011
The Noise of Data: Comments on Ewald’s “After Risk.” Carceral Notebooks 7 (2011): 109-118.

2010
Cosmologies of Credit: Transnational Mobility and the Politics of Destination in China. Duke University Press.

2010
The Attraction of Numbers: Accounting for Ritual Expenditures in Fuzhou, China. Anthropological Theory, 10 (1-2): 132-142.

2009
Departing China: Identification Papers and the Pursuit of Burial Rights in Fuzhou. In Sabine Berking and Magdalena Zolkos, eds., Between Life and Death; Governing Populations in the Era of Human Rights. Frankfurt: Peter Lang.

2007
Equation Fixations: On the Whole and the Sum of Dollars in Foreign Exchange. In A. Truitt & S. Senders, eds., Money: Ethnographic Encounters. Oxford: Berg Publishers.

2006
To Be ‘Emplaced’: Fuzhounese Migration and the Politics of Destination. Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power. 13(3): 395-425.

2001
When Alan Turning Was a Computer: Notes on the Rise and Decline of Punch Card Technologies. Connect: art.politics.theory.practice 1(2).

2000 Meet Halo Halo, a 28-minute video documentary produced and directed.

A Fantastic State of Ruin: The Painted Towns of Rajasthan - David Zurick
2018-11-15 17:30 - 19:30
A Fantastic State of Ruin: The Painted Towns of Rajasthan

Book Launch and Photo Lecture w/ David Zurick

Thursday, Nov. 15, 2018, 5:30-7:30 pm

Orozco Room (#712), 66 W. 12th St., The New School

RSVP NOW

In this illustrated lecture, geographer and photographer David Zurick explores the connections between visual culture, landscape change, and the loss of cultural memory in small-town India.

For several years, Zurick has been making photographs in the Shekhawati region of Rajasthan, among little-known settlements that owe their origins to the trade caravans that once crossed the Thar Desert. In the 1800s, prosperous merchants financed the construction of ornate buildings in the towns and commissioned artists to decorate them with exquisite murals depicting local life and society. For generations, these painted buildings served the towns as trading houses, pleasure palaces, temples, caravansaries, and private homes. Eventually, the trading families left Shekhawati for India’s burgeoning cities and abandoned their opulent structures. Some were left in the charge of caretakers; squatters took up residence in many; most simply remain vacant. The buildings have slowly deteriorated over time, ravaged by climate and neglect, and now lie scattered among the desert settlements as an elegiac collection of beautiful living ruins – a crumbling open-air gallery set amid the ordinary affairs of small town life in rural India. As the mural-clad buildings of the painted towns disappear, the opportunity for local residents to engage with their cultural heritage declines, and the beauty of our lived-world is further diminished. In this presentation, Zurick discovers the unique richness of this remote vernacular architecture and highlights ongoing efforts to designate the region a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

About David Zurick

David Zurick is an academically trained geographer (PhD, University of Hawaii and East-West Center, Honolulu) and a self-taught photographer. He writes and photographs extensively about Asia and the Pacific region, with a special focus on the cultural landscapes of South Asia and the Himalaya. His books and photography have won numerous awards and acclaimed reviews, including the National Outdoor Book Award, Banff International Mountain Book Award Finalist (twice), and Kentucky Arts Council Al Smith Visual Artist Fellowship Award (twice). His geographical studies and photography have been supported by research grants from the National Science Foundation, American Geographical Society, Banff Centre, and other major funding organizations. In 2009 he received the “Mt Everest Award” for his lifetime achievement in Himalaya studies. David is a Fellow of The Explorers Club. He lectures and exhibits at academic and film arts organizations worldwide. His photography books include Illustrated Atlas of the Himalaya, Southern Crossings, and Land of Pure Vision.

You can learn more about David’s work at his website www.davidzurick.com and blog www.medium.com/@david.zurick.

A People's Constitution: The Everyday Life of Law in the Indian Republic.
2018-11-28 17:30 - 19:30
The India China Institute is proud to present “A People’s Constitution: The Everyday Life of Law in the Indian Republic”, a talk with author, lawyer, and Yale professor Rohit De on his book, A People’s Constitution.

“What difference did the enactment of the the Indian constitution make on everyday lives of its citizens? It has long been contended that the Indian Constitution of 1950, a document in English created by elite consensus, has had little influence on India’s greater population. Drawing upon the previously unexplored records of the Supreme Court of India, A People’s Constitution upends this narrative and shows how the Constitution actually transformed the daily lives of citizens in profound and lasting ways. This remarkable legal process was led by individuals on the margins of society, and Rohit De looks at how drinkers, smugglers, petty vendors, butchers, and prostitutes—all despised minorities—shaped the constitutional culture.

The Constitution came alive in the popular imagination so much that ordinary people attributed meaning to its existence, took recourse to it, and argued with it. Focusing on the use of constitutional remedies by citizens against new state regulations seeking to reshape the society and economy, De illustrates how laws and policies were frequently undone or renegotiated from below using the state’s own procedures. De examines four important cases that set legal precedents: a Parsi journalist’s contestation of new alcohol prohibition laws, Marwari petty traders’ challenge to the system of commodity control, Muslim butchers’ petition against cow protection laws, and sex workers’ battle to protect their right to practice prostitution.”

The Author:

Rohit De is lawyer and an Assistant Professor of History at Yale University. Prior to Yale, he was a Mellon Research Fellow at the Centre for History and Economics at the University of Cambridge. He has worked with Chief Justice K.G Balakrishnan of the Supreme Court of India and worked on constitutional reform projects in Sri Lanka and Nepal. He is currently working on a history of civil liberties arising out of Asia and Africa post WW2 and mediated through Indian diasporic lawyers.

Unimagining Communities
2019-02-21 18:00 - 19:30
India China Institute in Partnership with Historical Studies of The New School for Social Research, delivers the annual Carol Breckenridge memorial lecture in south Asian history. The lecture, titled “Unimagining Communities- Suspicion and the Writing of History in Post-Colonial Societies” will be presented by Prof. Dilip Menon, the Mellon Chair of Indian Studies and the Director of the Centre for Indian Studies at the University of Witwatersrand in Africa. Prof. Menon was educated at the Universities of Delhi, Oxford and Cambridge. His research for the past decade has engaged with issues of caste, socialism and equality in modern India. Currently, he is working on issues of cultural and intellectual history and is engaged in a project on the writing of history in India between 1850 and 1960. The work inaugurated at the Centre is interdisciplinary and transnational in approach and looks afresh at issues of colonialism, modernity and migration in the Global South.Carol Breckenridge (1942-2009), a historian and scholar of global culture, brought along with her to different cities and campuses not only her erudition and insight into intellectual debates on global and transnational issues, but also her formidable gift of inspiring others through a rare combination of charm, generosity of spirit, hospitality and hard work.The journal Public Culture which she founded in 1988 with her husband and soulmate Arjun Appadurai, the later Sister Cities Project, and the articles and books she wrote and co-edited with colleagues, have brought new perceptions to the field and remain as evidence on her unstinting efforts against the stultifying effects of academic parochialism on the world at large. At The New School for Social Research and at other universities where Carol and Arjun have lived and taught, Breckenridge will be remembered for the way she personified these very commitments by her concern and care for her junior colleagues and students.

Buy TicketsBuy Tickets on Eventbrite

The Politics of Performance: Contesting Caste, Sexuality, and Gender in Contemporary Maharashtra, India
2019-03-06 11:30 - 13:30
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.
