Universities Under Attack
2020-02-26 17:00 - 19:00 (America/New_York) | 63 5th Ave
Speakers:Manu Bhagavan, Professor of History at Hunter College, The City University of New York. His interests include modern India, human rights, and sovereignty.Marcial Godoy, sociocultural anthropologist and Managing Director of the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics at New York University. He also serves on the Board of Directors of the North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA).Kumru Toktamis, Associate Professor of Social Science & Cultural Studies at Pratt Institute. She is an educator, transnational activist, and human rights researcher.Moderator: Mark Frazier, Professor, Politics Department, NSSR

This event is organized by India China Institute and Studly Graduate Program in International Affairs.

Making It Count: Statistics and Statecraft in the Early People’s Republic of China
2020-04-01 17:00 - 18:30 (America/New_York)
ICI Co-Director Mark Frazier’s Interview with Professor Arunabh Ghosh, author of Making it Count: Statistics and Statecraft in the Early People’s Republic of China (Princeton University Press, 2020).

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Border Politics: A Panel Discussion
2020-09-22 09:00 - 10:30 (America/New_York)
The lethal skirmishes between Indian and Chinese border patrols that took place in June in the Himalayan sector of their disputed border and continuing tensions have raised new questions about a possible “re-set” of relations between the two Asian giants and the prospects for regional stability. A panel of historians, diplomats, and political scientists will address these concerns through the long lens of history and more recent geopolitical trends.
-Shyam Saran: Senior Fellow at the Centre for Policy Research in New Delhi and former Foreign Secretary of India.

-Nimmi Kurian: ICI Fellow, Professor at the Centre for Policy Research in New Delhi and author, most recently, of India and China: Rethinking Borders and Security.

-Xiaoyu Pu: Associate Professor & Director of Graduate Studies, Department of Political Science, University of Nevada.

-Tansen Sen: Professor of History and Director of the Center for Global Asia, NYU SHANGHAI, and Global Network Professor, NYU. His most recent book is India, China, and the World: A Connected History (2017).

(Watch Video) India and China in the New Asian Geopolitics
2020-10-22 09:30 - 10:30 (America/New_York)
Watch again HERE

Former Ambassador and Indian National Security Advisor Shivshankar Menon will address how the increasingly tense relations between India and China are producing a “New Asian Geopolitics.” The talk will be moderated by Manjari Mahajan, Co-Director of India China Institute and Associate Professor at Julien J. Studley Graduate Programs in International Affairs, Schools of Public Engagement, The New School. Mary Watson, Executive Dean, Schools of Public Engagement will make introductory remarks. Ambassador Menon has had a distinguished career in government; he was Foreign Secretary of India from 2006-2009, and also served as the Indian Ambassador or High Commissioner to China, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Israel. At present he is Visiting Professor at Ashoka University, India; Chairman, Advisory Board, Institute of Chinese Studies, New Delhi; Distinguished Fellow of the Centre for Social and Economic Progress (formerly Brookings India); Distinguished Visiting Research Fellow at the National University of Singapore; Member, Board of Trustees, International Crisis Group; and a Distinguished Fellow at the Asia Society Policy Institute, New York. Ambassador Menon’s many publications include Choices: Inside the Making of Indian Foreign Policy (Brookings & Penguin Random House, 2016). He has been a Fisher Family Fellow at the Kennedy School, Harvard University, 2015 and a Richard Wilhelm Fellow at MIT in 2015. He was chosen one of the “Top 100 Global Thinkers” by Foreign Policy magazine in 2010. The talk is sponsored by the India China Institute. We thank our co-sponsors, the Julien J. Studley Graduate Programs in International Affairs at The New School, and the New School Global Studies Program. Thursday, October 22 9:30am – 10:30am US EDT/ 7:00pm – 8:00pm New Delhi/ 9:30pm – 10:30pm Beijing

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

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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 (America/New_York) | 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.

Histories of Global Health, COVID 19 and Asian Responses
2021-04-06 10:00 - 11:00 (America/New_York) | Online
Watch Here: https://youtu.be/TUtBi1htsyA

The conversation with historian Jean-Paul Gaudillière will interrogate how global health has evolved as a field that is defined by philanthropy, public-private partnerships, and donor-driven technical assistance. The COVID 19 pandemic has revealed how this field, while guided by expertise from Geneva and Seattle, has not taken into account public health models adopted by many Asian countries. By comparing experiences of countries in Asia, Africa, and Europe, the discussion hopes to put a critical lens on what regimes of global health have privileged – and systematically ignored.

Speaker: Jean-Paul Gaudillière (in conversation with Manjari Mahajan).

Jean-Paul Gaudillière is a historian of science and medicine and research professor at INSERM, the French National Institute of Health and Medical Research, and Director of the Center for Research on Medicine, Sciences, Health, Mental Health, and Society (CERMES3) in Paris.

Manjari Mahajan is an Associate Professor in the Julien J. Studley Graduate Programs in International Affairs and Co-Director of the India China Institute at The New School.

India, China, Africa: Emerging Transnational Politics in the Global South
2021-04-29 09:00 - 10:30 (America/New_York) | Online
Watch Here: https://youtu.be/DHDUiKHFoJw

The panel will explore how Africa has become both frontier and partner for India and China in realms of trade, infrastructure, finance, technology, and most recently COVID diplomacy, creating new hierarchies and imperatives for transnational politics in the South.

Speakers:

Lina Benabdallah: Assistant Professor, Department of Politics and International Affairs, Wake Forest University

Manjusha Nair: Associate Professor, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, George Mason University

Xiaoyang Tang: Associate Professor and Vice-Chair, Department of International Relations, Tsinghua University and Deputy Director, Carnegie–Tsinghua Center for Global Policy

Veda Vaidyanathan: Visiting Associate Fellow, Institute of Chinese Studies, Delhi

Collision Course? The 1980s and the Transformation of Water Politics in Asia
2021-09-23 10:00 - 11:30 (America/New_York) | Online
Watch Here: https://youtu.be/IBqzX7yL0H0

Until the 1980s, water featured relatively little in discussions of India’s relations with China. This talk delves into the history of that transformative decade of the 1980s, when first China and then India developed ambitious plans to dam the upper reaches of the Himalayan rivers, giving rise to new fears of future water conflicts. It seeks to situate those transformations in longer historical trajectories, going back to the mid-twentieth century. Our ways of envisaging the problem of shared water continue to be constrained by the models and choices made at the moment when China and India began their ascent to global economic power.

Speaker

Sunil Amrith

Renu and Anand Dhawan Professor of History

Yale University

Sunil Amrith is the Renu and Anand Dhawan Professor of History. His research focuses on the movements of people and the ecological processes that have connected South and Southeast Asia. Amrith’s areas of particular interest include environmental history, the history of migration, and the history of public health. He is a 2017 MacArthur Fellow, and recipient of the 2016 Infosys Prize in Humanities.

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Discussant

Sophia kalantzakos

Global Distinguished Professor, Environmental Studies and Public Policy

New York University

Sophia Kalantzakos is Global Distinguished Professor in Environmental Studies and Public Policy at New York University and a long-term affiliate at NYU Abu Dhabi. Her research focuses on resources and power; on new spatial imaginaries that reflect the changing ways that we think of global space and interdependence; and on the new emergent patterns and avenues of possibilist thinking as a way of re-imagining geopolitics for the 21st century.

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Anti-Asian Racism in the Era of Great Power Competition
2021-10-14 10:00 - 11:30 (America/New_York) | Online
The current wave of anti-Asian racism did not arise from a deliberate attack on the United States. Its causes have been much more indirect in nature. As such, those who inflame anti-Asian sentiment can do so in the name of “being accurate” on the supposed Chinese manufacturing of the COVID-19 virus, as President Donald Trump suggested. The political rhetoric that exaggerates China’s threat, including the insistence of the term “China virus,” has driven anti-Asian violence and continues unabated despite changes in the Administration as well as greater coverage by the mainstream media. In this talk, Jessica J. Lee of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft will explore how the current climate reduces space for U.S.-China cooperation on vital issues of mutual concern such as climate crisis and pandemics, as well as endangers Asian Americans by reinforcing centuries-old fears about their influence in society.

Speaker

Jessica J. LeeSenior Research Fellow, East Asia ProgramQuincy Institute For Responsible Statecraft

Jessica J. Lee is a Senior Research Fellow in the East Asia Program at the Quincy Institute. Her research interests include U.S. foreign policy toward the Indo-Pacific region, with an emphasis on alliances and North Korea.

Jessica’s analysis has been featured in The Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, The National Interest, USA Today, the Washington Times, The Nation, Arms Control Today, and Quincy Institute’s news platform Responsible Statecraft. She has testified before the House Committee on Foreign Affairs Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission and co-authored the Quincy Institute report, “Toward an Inclusive & Balanced Regional Order: A New U.S. Strategy in East Asia.”

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Discussant

Ying ChenAssistant Professor, Department of EconomicsThe New School for Social Research

Ying Chen is Assistant Professor of Economics at the New School and holds a Ph.D. in Economics from University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her work mainly explores the contradictions within capitalism and how they exhibit themselves. Topics she has studied include economic development, labor, and climate change, with a special focus on the global south. She has published in journals including Environment and Development Economics, Economics and Labor Relations Review, Journal of Labor and Society, Review of Radical Political Economics, International Review of Applied Economics, and so on.

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The Ecological Question in Global Health: A Panel Discussion
2021-11-18 09:00 - 11:00 (America/New_York) | Online
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The COVID-19 pandemic has brought into stark relief the interactions between climate change and global health and revealed the dangers of ‘siloization’ of these issues into different conceptual frameworks and governance regimes. The panel will explore how the understanding of the environment and public health can be bridged, and how these challenges are being addressed especially in India and China.

Panel Speakers

Arunabha GhoshFounder-CEOThe Council on Energy, Environment and Water, New Delhi, India

Dr Arunabha Ghosh is a public policy professional, adviser, author, columnist, and institution builder. As the founder-CEO of the Council on Energy, Environment and Water, since 2010, he has led CEEW to the top ranks as one of Asia’s leading policy research institutions (eight years in a row); and among the world’s 20 best climate think-tanks in 2013, 2014 and 2016. He was actively involved in conceptualising and designing the International Solar Alliance and is a founding board member of the Clean Energy Access Network (CLEAN). With experience in 45 countries, he previously worked at Princeton, Oxford, UNDP (New York), and WTO (Geneva). In 2018, Dr Ghosh was nominated to the UN’s Committee for Development Policy. In 2020, the Government of India appointed him Co-Chair of the energy, environment and climate change track for India’s forthcoming Science, Technology and Innovation Policy. His 2019 TED Talk on air quality (Mission 80-80-80) has over 250,000 views. He is co-Chair of the World Economic Forum’s Global Future Council on Clean Air and is a member of the international high-level panel of the Environment of Peace initiative. He also serves on the Board of Directors of ClimateWorks Foundation.

Dr Ghosh advises governments, industry, civil society and international organisations around the world. This has included India’s Prime Minister’s Office, several ministries and state governments. In 2015, he was invited by France, as a Personnalité d’Avenir, to advise on the COP21 climate negotiations; and also advised extensively on HFC negotiations. He is the co-author/editor of four books and his essay “Rethink India’s energy strategy” in Nature was selected as one of 2015’s ten most influential essays. He holds a D.Phil. from Oxford and topped Economics from St. Stephen’s College, Delhi.

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Lyle FearnleyAssistant Professor of AnthropologySingapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD)

Lyle Fearnley is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at SUTD. Trained as an anthropologist of science and medicine, Fearnley received a Joint Ph.D. in Medical Anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley and San Francisco. His book, Virulent Zones: Animal Disease and Global Health at China’s Pandemic Epicenter, is published on Duke University Press. Currently, he is conducting two research projects.

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Yifei LiAssistant Professor of Environmental StudiesNew York University Shanghai

Yifei Li is an Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies at NYU Shanghai and Global Network Assistant Professor at NYU. Professor Li’s research concerns both the macro-level implications of Chinese environmental governance for state-society relations, marginalized populations, and global ecological sustainability, as well as the micro-level bureaucratic processes of China’s state interventions into the environmental realm.

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Mridula PaulPostgraduate Researcher at the Department of Geography Policy and DevelopmentUniversity of Northumbria, UK

Mridula Mary Paul is a lawyer and environmental policy specialist. She is a Postgraduate Researcher at the Department of Geography Policy and Development, University of Northumbria, Newcastle, UK. She works on the political ecology of zoonoses, with a focus on One Health and India. Mridula is a member of IUCN’s Sustainable Use and Livelihoods Specialist Group, and is the editor of Courting the Environment, a newsletter that aims to convey environmental and ecological research to lawyers.

Research Award for The New School Students
2021-11-30 09:00 - 10:00 (America/New_York) | Online
Information Session & Past Student Fellows’ Presentations

https://youtu.be/FWvHgG6UycoWatch Here
India China Institute at The New School is pleased to announce the student research award 2022 and is now welcoming applications from full-time undergraduate and graduate students at The New School. This is an exciting opportunity for students to design and implement thorough archival research or secondary research on a topic of their choice within the context of India, China and beyond.
Join the information session and learn more about the opportunity by hearing from the previous cohort of ICI student fellows. The cohort consists of six students who conducted research in 2019 – 2020 and will present brief reflections on their work and experiences.
2019 – 2020 Student Fellows

The Emerging Public Realm of the Greater Bay Area: Approaches to Public Space in a Chinese Megaregion: Book Launch and Author Panel
2021-12-02 09:00 - 10:30 (America/New_York) | Online
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Through illustrated case studies, twenty scholars and practitioners in this edited volume focus on the emerging public realm and the critical transformations of public space in the world’s most populous megaregion —the Greater Bay Area of southeastern China— projected to reach eighty million inhabitants by the year 2025.

Editor and Moderator

Timothy JachnaDean, College of Design, Architecture, Art and PlanningUNIVERSITY OF CINCINNATI

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Editor

Miodrag MitrašinovićProfessor of Urbanism and ArchitecturePARSONS SCHOOL OF DESIGN, THE NEW SCHOOL

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Speakers

Juan DuDean, John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and DesignUNIVERSITY OF TORONTO

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Mary Ann O’DonnellIndependent Artist-EthnographerCofounderTHE HANDSHAKE-302 ART SPACE, Shenzhen, China

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Brian McGrathProfessor of Urban DesignPARSONS SCHOOL OF DESIGN, THE NEW SCHOOL

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Paul ChuDepartment HeadCHU HAI COLLEGE OF HIGHER EDUCATION

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Foreign reporting on China from within and outside: An Indian perspective
2022-02-10 09:00 - 10:00 (America/New_York) | Online
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Since 2004, China has been offering undergraduate medical courses in English and has over the years emerged as a destination for foreign students, many of them from the subcontinent. Through a combination of word-of-mouth and an informal network of private educational consultants, thousands of aspiring doctors in India have opted for a Chinese medical degree. Over the years, fierce competition back home and limited medical seats have pushed more students to consider India’s neighbor as an option which has become an emerging player in a market that has traditionally been dominated by Russia and other east European countries.

Drawing on this specific story of the journey of hundreds of Indian students seeking a medical degree in China each year, the talk will look at the broader ways in which India and China interact across different fields. It was an Indian medical student returning from Wuhan to Kerala who was identified as Patient Zero when India began tracking Covid-cases in early 2020. The talk will follow the lives of students over the course of the pandemic as they make sense of online education, strict border control, and vaccine requirements. The talk will also touch upon information gathering and reporting in China, and the difficulties of looking in from outside. It will provide an understanding of the ecosystem in which Indian foreign reporting operates.

Speaker

Sowmiya AshokIndependent JournalistFormer Correspondent, The Hindu and The Indian Express

Sowmiya Ashok is an independent journalist based in Chennai. She has worked as a correspondent for two prominent Indian dailies The Hindu and The Indian Express.

In 2019, she was the Beijing correspondent for The Indian Express where she attempted to tell stories that go beyond the official bilateral frame. She has lived and worked in the US, China, and Australia and her work has been featured in several Indian and international publications. She writes about politics, culture, history, and the ways in which China and India interact away from geopolitics. Currently, she is learning Mandarin at the National Taiwan University in Taipei.

New Urbanisms of China and India: A Panel Discussion
2022-03-03 10:00 - 11:30 (America/New_York) | Online
https://youtu.be/c5DLJsiBIvQWatch Here
A growing body of research on urban India and China shows that the concepts drawn from the histories of urbanization in the West are not adequate for understanding the new forms of power, networks, capital, and infrastructure that constitute the rapidly changing urban ecologies of China and India. The authors of two recent books will discuss the meanings and significance of the “urban” in two of the largest and most populous urban centers in the world: Greater Mumbai and the Municipality of Chongqing. Drawing from their research on transformational processes that span conventional boundaries of rural-urban, formal-informal, state-society, citizen-subject, the panel addresses questions of governance, migration, infrastructure, and public goods provision. Lisa Björkman is the editor of Bombay Brokers (Duke University Press, 2021). Nick R. Smith is the author of The End of the Village: Planning the Urbanization of Rural China (University of Minnesota Press, 2021).
Speakers

Lisa BjörkmanAssociate Professor, Urban and Public AffairsUniversity of Louisville
Senior Research AssociateMax Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Germany
Lisa Björkman is a political ethnographer and anthropologist interested in the material infrastructures and mediations of political life. She is the editor of Bombay Brokers, published by Duke University Press in 2021. Her research in the Indian city of Mumbai has studied how global-level processes of urbanization and urban transformation are redrawing lines of socio-spatial inclusions and exclusions in that city, animating new arenas of political mobilization, contention, and representation. Her current research builds on themes that emerged out of her doctoral research on everyday politics of infrastructural provisioning and access in Mumbai, to explicitly pursue anthropology of democracy, mediation, and mass-political representation in contemporary India.
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Nick R. SmithAssistant Professor, Architecture and Urban StudiesBarnard College of Columbia University
Nick R. Smith is a scholar of urban transformation and planning. His work explores the city as an institution and planning as a process of institution building. Combining the perspectives of new institutional economics, development anthropology, and urban sociology, Smith investigates how urbanization inscribes the “rules of the game” into the space of the city. Using a combination of ethnography, spatial analysis, and archival research, he primarily pursues these processes through investigations of peri-urban villages—contexts of instability, liminality, and rapid change where new forms of urbanization are produced and contested.
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The Responses of India and China to the War in Ukraine
2022-04-14 09:00 - 11:00 UTC | Online
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The Russian invasion of Ukraine, which prompted immediate censure and sanctions against Russia by Western governments, has been met with a more ambivalent response by China and India. While both governments have issued statements deploring the harm to civilians and loss of life, for different reasons, they have abstained from United Nations’ resolutions condemning Russia and sought ways to avoid having to choose sides with either the US-led coalition or with Russia. To understand the responses to the conflict, please join a panel featuring foreign policy analysts from India and China.

The event is co-sponsored by Global Studies and Julien J. Studley Graduate Programs in International Affairs at The New School.

SPEAKERS

Shyam SaranFORMER FOREIGN SECRETARY OF INDIASenior FellowCENTRE FOR POLICY RESEARCH

Shyam Saran is a Senior Fellow and Member of the Governing Board at the Centre for Policy Research. He is a former Foreign Secretary of India and has served as Prime Minister’s Special Envoy For Nuclear Affairs and Climate Change. After leaving government service in 2010, he has headed the Research and Information System for Developing Countries, a prestigious think tank focusing on economic issues (2011-2017), and was Chairman of the National Security Advisory Board under the National Security Council (2013-15). He is currently a Life Trustee of India International Centre, a Member of the Governing Board of the Institute of Chinese Studies, a Trustee at the World Wildlife Fund (India), and a Member of the Executive Council of the Federation of Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI). He has recently published a book, How India Sees the World.

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LU, YangResearch Fellow Institute of the Belt and Road InitiativeTSINGHUA UNIVERSITY

Dr. LU, Yang is currently a research fellow at the Institute of the Belt and Road Initiative, Tsinghua University. She got her Bachelor’s in Xiamen University and her master’s and a doctorate in political science at the University of Heidelberg, Germany. She was a post-doc at the Department of International Relations, Tsinghua University from 2015 to 2018, was a lecturer at the South Asia Institute, Heidelberg University, awarded the China India Scholar Leaders Fellowship of India China Institute, The New School in New York, Chinese Government Award for Outstanding Self-financed Students Abroad, and fellowship of German Academy Exchange Service (DAAD). Her research area is international politics, focusing on India and South Asia, Germany, and Europe. In recent years she has been working on China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), and related regional cooperation programs. She has published numerous academic articles and opinion pieces, was invited by CGTN, CCTV-13, Phoenix TV commenting news related to South Asia and BRI.

Nimmi KurianProfessor CENTRE FOR POLICY RESEARCH

Nimmi Kurian is a Professor at the Centre for Policy Research. Her research focuses in particular on the border regions between South Asia and Southeast Asia, India’s neighborhood policy, federalism and foreign policy, transboundary water politics, and comparative regionalism. Nimmi serves on the External Advisory Board of the India China Institute, The New School, New York, and on the Fellowship Committee of the China Studies Postdoctoral Fellowship Program, Centre for China Studies, Ashoka University. She has held Fellowships from the India China Institute, The New School, New York, and the Charles Wallace India Trust. She holds an MA, MPhil, and Ph.D. in International Relations from the Jawaharlal Nehru University.Nimmi has written and published widely on alternative spatial imaginations of South Asia, a theme that is explored in detail in her two books India China Borderlands: Conversations Beyond the Centre (Sage, 2014) and India and China: Rethinking Borders and Security (co-author) (University of Michigan Press, 2016).

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DA, WeiDirector of the Center for International Security and Strategy (CISS)Professor, School of Social SciencesTSINGHUA UNIVERSITY

Dr. Da’s research expertise covers China-US relations and US security & foreign policy. Da Wei has worked in China’s academic and policy community for more than 2 decades. Prior to his current positions, Dr. Da Wei was the assistant president of the University of International Relations (2017-2020), director of the Institute of American Studies, China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations (2013-2017). He has written hundreds of policy papers for the Chinese government and published dozens of academic papers in journals in China, the US, and other countries.Da Wei earned his BA and MA from UIR and his Ph.D. from CICIR. He was a visiting senior fellow at the Atlantic Council of the United States from 2006 to 2007, and a visiting senior associate at SAIS, Johns Hopkins University from 2008 to 2009.

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Shifting Geographies of Expertise and Policymaking
2022-09-09 00:00 - 2022-09-10 23:59 (America/New_York) | Centre on Asia and Globalization, 469C Bukit Timah Road, Singapore, 259772, Singapore
The first in-person workshop that ICI hosts since Covid will takes place at CAG, Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, National University of Singapore. The workshop addresses the changing relationships between expertise and policymaking in India, China, and beyond. In both countries, an increasing reliance on technical expertise for governance has been juxtaposed alongside new conceptions of who counts as a relevant expert. The response to the COVID-19 pandemic is perhaps the most vivid of many instances that illuminate the formation of novel epistemic communities and new institutional frameworks and infrastructures for knowledge production for policymaking. This in-person conference will bring SGEP fellows together to further strengthening fellowships among the fellows, and more importantly, review and critique the researches, in preparation for an academic publication of the fellows’ outstanding insightful research works.

SGEP Scholars

India China Day 2022
2022-09-29 15:00 - 16:30 (America/New_York) | Starr Foundation Hall, UL102 63 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY, 10011
Information Session for ICI Student Research Award & Past Student Fellows’ Presentations

On Sep. 29 we will celebrate India China Day with our 2022 – 2023 Student Fellows in preparation for the 2022 – 2023 student research award for full-time undergraduate and graduate students at The New School. This is an exciting opportunity for students to design and implement thorough archival research or secondary research on a topic of their choice within the context of India, China and beyond.

Join us in celebration and learn more about the opportunity by hearing from the previous cohort of ICI student fellows. The cohort consists of seven students who conducted research in 2022 – 2023 and will present brief reflections on their work and experiences.

2022 – 2023 Student Fellows

India China Institute's Lunchtime Talks for The New School Community
2022-11-10 12:00 - 13:00 UTC | Wolff Conference Room – Albert and Vera List Academic Center, room D1103, 6 East 16th Street, New York, New York, 10003, United States
India China Institute is pleased to offer bi-weekly lunchtime talks for The New School faculty, students and staff.

Event Series

Politics of Gender in Work and Innovation in India and China
2022-10-13 10:00 - 11:30 UTC | Online
Join us for a discussion of “Politics of Gender in Work and Innovation in India and China.”

Drawing on ethnographic research of design practices in post-liberalization India, Prof. Lilly Irani traces how designers target everyday acts of social reproduction as sites of intervention and valorization through design intervention. She makes the case with stories of water cooling, contrasting devalued water cooling practices characterized as jugaad or workaround with proper, branded products recognizable as innovation. These contrasting categories act as signposts to see how design practices proposed as participatory and inclusive can still reproduce class, caste, and gender hierarchies in contemporary India. She draws from Chasing Innovation: Making Entrepreneurial Citizens in Modern India (Princeton University Press, 2019). Prof. Yige Dong draws on a case study of Zhengzhou, a city located in China’s heartland that has transformed from a major textile mill town in the socialist period to the world largest iPhone manufacturing center in the last decade. Extending the analytical focus from the factory shop floor to the space of social reproduction, this talk discusses how dynamics in the realm of gender and care work has constituted the processes of political economy and shaped the outcomes of China’s industrial development.

SPEAKERS

Lilly IraniAssociate ProfessorCommunication, Science Studies, Computer Science, Critical Gender Studies, Design LabUNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA SAN DIEGO

Lilly Irani is an Associate Professor of Communication & Science Studies at University of California, San Diego. She also serves as faculty in the Design Lab, Institute for Practical Ethics, the program in Critical Gender Studies, and sits on the Academic Advisory Board of AI Now (NYU). She is author of Chasing Innovation: Making Entrepreneurial Citizens in Modern India (Princeton University Press, 2019) and Redacted (with Jesse Marx) (Taller California, 2021). Chasing Innovation has been awarded the 2020 International Communication Association Outstanding Book Award and the 2019 Diana Forsythe Prize for feminist anthropological research on work, science, or technology, including biomedicine. Her research examines the cultural politics of high-tech work and the counter-practices they generate, as both an ethnographer, a designer, and a former technology worker. She is a co-founder of the digital worker advocacy organization Turkopticon. Her work has appeared at ACM SIGCHI, New Media & Society, Science, Technology & Human Values, South Atlantic Quarterly, and other venues. She sits on the Editorial Committee of Public Culture and on the Editorial Advisory Boards of New Technology, Work, and Employment and Design and Culture. She has a Ph.D. in Informatics from University of California, Irvine.

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Yige DongAssistant Professor Department of SociologyDepartment of Global Gender & Sexuality StudiesUNIVERSITY AT BUFFALO, THE STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK

Yige Dong, PhD, is an assistant professor in the UB Department of Sociology and in the Department of Global Gender and Sexuality Studies.Prof. Dong’s primary research interest lies at the intersection of political economy, social inequality, and social change. Currently, she is working on a book project, The Fabric of Care: Women’s Work and the Politics of Livelihood in Industrial China, which examines the changing politics of care in China’s industrial sector in the past century. Prof. Dong has been awarded the Luce/ACLS Early Career Fellowship in China Studies (2021-2022).

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DISCUSSANT

Ying ChenAssistant ProfessorEconomics; Director of Undergraduate Studies and Departmental Faculty Advisor, EconomicsTHE NEW SCHOOL FOR SOCIAL RESEARCH

Ying Chen is Assistant Professor of Economics at the New School and holds a Ph.D. in Economics from University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her work explores the contradictions within capitalism and how they exhibit themselves. Topics she has studied include economic development, labor, and climate change, with a special focus on the global south. She has published in journals including Environment and Development Economics, Economics and Labor Relations Review, Journal of Labor and Society, Review of Radical Political Economics, International Review of Applied Economics, and so on. She was also consulted for the working of the UNCTAD Trade and Development Report 2021.

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Discussion with Artist Hai Zhang on BEING: A Digital Archive of the Age of Flux in China
2022-11-10 15:00 - 16:15 UTC | Anna-Maria and Stephen Kellen Auditorium,, 66 5th Ave room N101, New York, NY, 10011, USA
Join Hai Zhang, an Artist and Visiting Artist for the inauguration of his collaborative digital archive project with India China Institute titled – ‘BEING’. Between 2008 and 2019, Zhang frequently visited China, his homeland, to photograph the changing social and physical landscape. He says:“Every time I return to China (whether on specific topics or not), I become increasingly aware of the passage of time between visits and my inability to keep pace with the country. It has been a human impulse to collect images like souvenirs as a reminder of the experience. Yet, the documentary images serve as a perfect metaphor from the fragmentary nature of memory and the desire to take ownership of it.”Zhang’s work with India China Institute establishes the continuity between disjointed experiences by bringing individual lives in China to the forefront of contextual discourse. This digital archive closely examines life in a society that is in a perpetual state of flux. In addition, Zhang will share his thoughts on the process of archiving and what it means to make archival material accessible to the public.As Dr. Roland Benoit, a German neuroscientist once said, “Our memory is not made for the past, but for the future.” So is the project – BEING.

SPEAKERS

Hai ZhangPHOTOGRAPHER, VISITING ARTIST, INDIA CHINA INSTITUTE

ZHANG, Hai was born in Kunming, China in 1976. In 2000, after his graduation of the college in Chongqing, he moved to the US. Since then, he has lived in Alabama, Miami, Washington, DC and New York City. Before he was able to devote himself to photographic work, he worked for the renowned architect, Rafael Vinoly, for several years.

ZHANG is interested in photography as a vital tool to investigate the context whether alien or familiar. While he has dedicated a great deal of energy and time to photograph in China and the Deep South of the US, he has also traveled to Costa Rica, Russia and Southeast Asia for projects.

ZHANG is also interested in making photography books not for a presentation but an integral investigative process to examine the subjects and photography itself. He has been applying the permutation and variation in book making for his short and long term projects as well as subject matters.

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ONLINE | Seminar Series: Flows, Infrastructure, Citizenship in India and China (Feb. 27 - Mar. 10)
2023-03-03 00:00 - 2023-03-10 23:59 (America/New_York)
Opening Dialogue

Flows

Infrastructure

Citizenship

Hosted by: Sarandha Jain

Labor flows in from distant lands for the construction of a dam. The dam obstructs the flow of a river. The dam creates refugees, who flow across borders, in search of new citizenship. Airports are necessitated by the flow of people and things. Alongside passports and digital identities, they also control the flow of people and things. Canals and bridges generate flows. Authorities managing them restrict the same flows, also invoking proof of citizenship. Street hawkers and carts obstruct the flow of road traffic. They also create flows of people, money, and things. Public and private authorities managing circulatory infrastructures and flows such as roads, transportation, water supply, energy provision, and suchlike, demand proof of citizenship and identity by residents/commuters to access them. These disparate images reflect varying interplays between flows, infrastructure, and citizenship.

Several inquiries are possible about this tripartite arrangement between them. This dialogue series explores the many ways in which they encounter each other, and what those co-arrangements mean for the evolving nature of the state. How do flows of people, objects, and natural substances facilitate and/or obstruct the constructions of infrastructure, and vice versa? How do these flows relate similarly with constructions of citizenship? In other words, what is the meaning of flows to both, infrastructure and citizenship, and to their relationship with each other: i.e., how do infrastructures and notions of citizenship coalesce and become useful for each other through flows of people, objects, and natural substances? Further, what infrastructures are created to regulate flows for protecting certain notions and forms of citizenship (documents, digital identities, surveillance, detention centers, dams, etc.)? How and when do flows of people, objects, and substances escape regulation? What forms of state-citizen relations arise from the state’s attempts at regulating flows and infrastructures, and their occasional escape from this? This series studies the collective interface between flows, infrastructures, and citizenship, and the structures and systems emerging from this triad, and created to further cement it.

In the last few years, there has been a renewed investment in policing citizenship in India and China. This has given rise to many new debates, instituted new systems in these countries, and new politics have emerged from them. Owing to advancements in technology, new infrastructural capabilities have been afforded to the governments of these countries for implementing their new designs regarding citizenship and the regulation of flows. Flows, however, continue to evade policing and discipline. What can we learn from the current moment by analyzing the ever-evolving encounter between flows, infrastructures, and citizenship in India and China? Furthermore, what has been the evolution in the nature of the state and in its role as an infrastructural state (as provider and as policer) to monitor flows? As the state’s infrastructural nature takes precedence, through the lens of flows, this series charts the evolution in the nature of the state, in the relationship between the state and citizens in India and China, and between infrastructures and state-citizen relations.

This series consists of four dialogues over Spring 2023, held virtually on zoom. These dialogues are between a scholar of India and another of China, who work on linked thematics; and are moderated by a third scholar who shares their thematic synergies. The opening dialogue lays the ground for the overall intellectual aims of the series by speaking to all three conceptual and empirical aspects: flows, infrastructures, and citizenship, and how they connect. The following three dialogues, while still focused on the interface between flows, infrastructure, and citizenship, highlight one of them more, by inviting scholars of India and China who specialize in flows (for the second dialogue), infrastructure (for the third), and citizenship (for the fourth).

Opening dialogue, Feb 27, 2023, 9.30am – 11.00am EST: Townsend Middleton (India), Ka Ming Wu (China), Sarandha Jain (discussant)Flows, March 3, 2023, 10.00am – 11.30am EST: Ritajyoti Bandyopadhyay (India), Yimin Zhao (China), Antina von Schnitzler (discussant)Infrastructure, March 6, 2023, 10.00am – 11.30am EST: Sunalini Kumar (India), Amy Zhang (China), Emma Park (discussant)Citizenship, March 10, 2023, 11.00am – 12.30pm EST: Suraj Gogoi (India), Andrew Grant (China), Alexandra Delano (discussant)

This series is open to the public and audience is not limited to TNS affiliates.

Speakers

Townsend MiddletonAssociate Professor AnthropologyUNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA AT CHAPEL HILL

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Ka Ming WuAssociate Professor Cultural and Religious StudiesCHINESE UNIVERSITY OF HONG KONG

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Ritajyoti BandyopadhyayAssistant ProfessorHumanities and Social SciencesINDIAN INSTITUTE OF SCIENCE EDUCATION AND RESEARCH

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Yimin ZhaoAssistant ProfessorUrban Planning and ManagementRENMIN UNIVERSITY OF CHINA

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Sunalini KumarAssociate Professor School of Global AffairsAMBEDKAR UNIVERSITY

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Amy ZhangAssistant Professor, AnthropologyNEW YORK UNIVERSITY

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Suraj GogoiAssistant ProfessorSchool of Liberal Arts and SciencesRV UNIVERSITY

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Andrew GrantVisiting ScholarInternational Studies ProgramBOSTON COLLEGE

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Discussants

Sarandha JainPostdoctoral FellowINDIA CHINA INSTITUTE

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Antina von SchnitzlerAssociate Professor of International AffairsTHE NEW SCHOOL

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Emma ParkAssistant Professor of HistoryTHE NEW SCHOOL FOR SOCIAL RESEARCH

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Alexandra Delano AlonsoAssociate Professor of Global StudiesTHE NEW SCHOOL

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ONLINE | Flows from Event series: Flows, Infrastructure, Citizenship in India and China
2023-03-03 10:00 - 11:00 (America/New_York) | Online
Flows

Hosted by: Sarandha Jain

How do flows of people, things, resources, natural substances encounter infrastructure, and what does that do to arrangements of citizenship? How is the state involved in these encounters and arrangements? Addressing these questions, the second dialogue in the seminar series “Flows, Infrastructure and Citizenship in India and China“, is between Ritajyoti Bandhyopadhyay, Assistant Professor of Humanities and Social Sciences at Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, and Yimin Zhao, Assistant Professor of Urban Planning and Management at Renmin University of China, facilitated by Antina von Schnitzler, Associate Professor of International Affairs at The New School. While still emphasizing the triadic interface between flows, infrastructure, and citizenship, the speakers here underscore flows more, and discuss what they mean in relation to infrastructure and citizenship, and how that relationship shapes and is shaped by the state, in India and China. (Please see the full description of this series for a detailed understanding of the dialogues).

Presentation titles:

Ritajyoti Bandhyopadhyay – “Dialectics of the Capitalist Urban Process: Infrastructure and Human Action in Twentieth-Century Calcutta”

Yimin Zhao – “Flows of People, Flows of Water, and Flows of Cars: The Political Infrastructure of (non-)Citizenship”

Ritajyoti BandyopadhyayAssistant ProfessorHumanities and Social SciencesINDIAN INSTITUTE OF SCIENCE EDUCATION AND RESEARCH

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Yimin ZhaoAssistant ProfessorUrban Planning and ManagementRENMIN UNIVERSITY OF CHINA

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ONLINE | Infrastructure from Event series: Flows, Infrastructure, Citizenship in India and China
2023-03-06 10:00 - 11:30 (America/New_York) | Online
Infrastructure

Hosted by: Sarandha Jain

How do infrastructures and notions of citizenship coalesce and become useful for each other through flows of people, objects, and natural substances? What infrastructures are created to regulate flows for protecting certain notions and forms of citizenship (such as documents, digital identities, surveillance, detention centers, dams, etc.)? Addressing these questions, the third dialogue in the seminar series “Flows, Infrastructure and Citizenship in India and China“, is between Sunalini Kumar, Associate Professor at the School of Global Affairs at Ambedkar University, and Amy Zhang, Assistant Professor of Anthropology at New York University, facilitated by Emma Park, Assistant Professor of History at the New School for Social Research. While still emphasizing the triadic interface between flows, infrastructure, and citizenship, the speakers here underscore infrastructure more, and discuss what it means in relation to flows and citizenship, and how that relationship shapes and is shaped by the state, in India and China. (Please see the full description of this series for a detailed understanding of the dialogues).

Presentation titles:

Sunalini Kumar – “Tying the Camel and Goat Together: The Abrogation of Rural Citizenship in Urbanising Delhi”

Amy Zhang – “Re-thinking China’s Infrastructural Turn through Waste”

Sunalini KumarAssociate Professor School of Global AffairsAMBEDKAR UNIVERSITY

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Amy ZhangAssistant Professor, AnthropologyNEW YORK UNIVERSITY

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ONLINE | Citizenship from Event series: Flows, Infrastructure, Citizenship in India and China
2023-03-10 11:00 - 12:30 (America/New_York) | Online
Citizenship

Hosted by: Sarandha Jain

How does the migration and mobility of people, objects, and natural substances facilitate and obstruct the constructions of infrastructure, and vice versa, and of citizenship, and vice versa? What forms of state-citizen relations arise from the state’s attempts at regulating flows and infrastructures, and their occasional escape from this? Addressing these questions, the fourth dialogue in the seminar series “Flows, Infrastructure and Citizenship in India and China“, is between Suraj Gogoi, Assistant Professor at RV University’s School of Liberal Arts and Sciences, and Andrew Grant, Visiting Assistant Professor at Boston College’s International Studies Program, facilitated by Alexandra Delano Alonso, Associate Professor of Global Studies at The New School. While still emphasizing the triadic interface between flows, infrastructure, and citizenship, the speakers here underscore citizenship more, and discuss what it means in relation to flows and infrastructure, and how that relationship shapes and is shaped by the state, in India and China. (Please see the full description of this series for a detailed understanding of the dialogues).

Presentation titles:

Suraj Gogoi – “Who Comes after the National Register of Citizens (NRC)?”

Andrew Grant – “Citizenship in China’s Contemporary Inner Asian Borderlands: Contradictions between Development and Security”

Suraj GogoiAssistant ProfessorSchool of Liberal Arts and SciencesRV UNIVERSITY

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Andrew GrantVisiting ScholarInternational Studies ProgramBOSTON COLLEGE

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ONLINE | Book Launch: Against NGOs: A critical perspective on Civil Society, Management, and Development
2023-03-30 09:00 - 10:30 (America/New_York) | Online
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What would development look like if its practitioners and scholars were ‘against NGOs,’ challenging common sense about them? This book presents a critical perspective on NGOs, describing how they emerged as key agents of development over time. Through an interpretative history based on Gramscian concepts it shows how civil society organizations were gradually enlisted in development as non-state technocratic actors. The book argues that management studies and development studies emerged as commonsensical explanations for capitalist crises. Each offered complementary solutions to balance the needs of capital and society, in particular historical circumstances. These solutions also situated civil society as agents of development and vectors of management. Against NGOs fills a gap within the literature of management and development studies through its original discussion of their historical interconnections and shared themes. The book raises provocative questions on what forms of knowledge-politics can respond productively to the crises of our contemporary moment.

Speaker/Author

Nidhi Srinivas
Associate Professor of ManagementMilano School of Policy, Management, and Environment THE NEW SCHOOL

Nidhi Srinivas is Associate Professor of Management at Milano School of Policy, Management, and Environment. His research centers on social innovation and postcolonial studies, mobilizing critical theory to study a variety of topics, including management history, international development, mutual aid, ecological politics and civic design. He publishes widely and has received several fellowships, including from Erasmus Mundus, the India China Institute, and the BRICS policy center. He has also served as visiting professor at different institutions, including the ITC-ILO, Turin; Hitotsubashi University, Tokyo; Sao Paulo School of Business Administration; and the Indian Institute of Management Bangalore.

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Discussants

Suchitra VijayanAuthor & ResearcherNEW YORK UNIVERSITY

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Alf Gunvald NilsenProfessor, Department of SociologyUNIVERSITY OF PRETORIA

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Film Screening | Those 4 Years
2023-04-04 12:00 - 13:30 (America/New_York) | Anna-Maria and Stephen Kellen Auditorium,, 66 5th Ave room N101, New York, NY, 10011, USA
India China Institute is excited to host the screening of the recent research documentary of ICI’s past fellow Joe Thomas K called “Those 4 Years“.

The Nilgiris have gained the distinction of being a geographic indication for tea, today. Somewhere behind the present glory is a remote connection with the Chinese which remains forgotten. “Those 4 Years” is an amazing journey into the lives of those Chinese who came to India around the middle of the 19th century… speaking a language unknown to their neighbors when they first arrived. The film journeys across three countries and reams of colonial office records to retrace the places those people came from, the means and mode of their arrival, and how many of them ended up making India their home. It is a history of people, plants and places – as it catalogues their contributions to plantations, locates places and sites associated with their earliest arrival and stay and, more remarkably, manages to locate some of the descendants of those Chinese who arrived in India over 150 years ago.

Read the reviews below: “Tracing 19th Century Connections in South India” — The Hindu

“Film traces history of little-known Indian-Chinese group” — China Daily

“The Chinese touch behind Indian tea: documentary shows sweeter side of historical ties”– South China Morning Post

In Conversation with Film Director

Joe Thomas KarackattuAssociate ProfessorINDIAN INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY MADRAS

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IN PERSON | Where does the Silk Road end? - power, recognition, and the aesthetics of prestige
2023-04-06 12:00 - 13:30 (America/New_York) | Wolff Conference Room – Albert and Vera List Academic Center, room D1103, 6 East 16th Street, New York, New York, 10003, United States
IR scholars often define prestige as “reputation for power” and argue for its significance in the context of high-stakes negotiations, the dynamics of power transition, or (bi-polar) competition to attract allies and partners. Famously, Gilpin argued that for international relations prestige is “enormously important” – even more so than power itself. This is because “if your strength is recognized, you can generally achieve your aims without having to use it.” But whereas Gilpin and others correctly conceptualize the power of prestige in driving desired outcomes, there is yet little attention to what exactly it means for strength to be “recognized,” and who is doing the recognizing.

Drawing on the “visual turn” in IR and starting from the original (visual) connotation of prestige as “dazzling influence” and “glamour,” this talk interrogates the links between prestige and recognition from the vantage point of the politics of aesthetics. For the purpose, I turn to select cases linked to China’s bid for international prestige, especially based on the invocation of common (Silk Road) past and shared future. I show how, in different communities, visual representations and public displays disrupt standard formulations of a shared (Silk Road) past and also bring forth alternative understandings of the meaning and work of prestige. These cases, I suggest, can help clarify not only the important links between power and recognition, but can also showcase the need for critical exploration of prestige in relation to empire and ontologies of power, the complexities of post-colonial order, and the evolving spaces for political agency.

Speakers

Marina Jose KanetiAssistant Professor in International AffairsLEE KUAN YEW SCHOOL OF PUBLIC POLICY, NATIONAL UNIVERSITY OF SINGAPORE

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Discussant

Tansen SenProfessor of HistoryNEW YORK UNIVERSITY SHANGHAI

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HYBRID | Data Engines: The Allure of Automating China’s Soil and Soul
2023-04-17 17:30 - 19:00 (America/New_York) | Starr Foundation Hall UL102, UL102 63 Fifth Ave, New York, New York, 100011, United States
https://youtu.be/83OHkPfdHyQWatch Here

In this talk, Silvia Lindtner will draw from ethnographic research she has conducted over the last 14 months across two sites in China: 1) small-scale businesses that center on alternative food and spiritual practices via life in nature and the countryside and 2) large-scale, data-driven agricultural experiments at the outskirts of major urban centers. Prof. Lindtner will discuss how these two sites interact for the implementation of two recent state policies on “rural revitalization” and “national strengthening.” These policies are aimed at reinvesting into China’s “hinterlands:” from rural farmland to people’s most inner selves. They position data-driven techniques of automation, surveillance technology, and smart systems as key to the state’s ability to manage life that has partially escaped the state’s reach. And they call upon China’s youths who have turned away from the city to live and work in China’s countryside to co-produce what she calls “data engines,” i.e. a participatory form of techno-governance driven by an engineering mindset that aims to cultivate citizens as productive selves who operate on behalf of the party state and its ambition to build a “strong China” by turning inwards—China’s history, soil, and agriculture. Data engines, she shows, simultaneously enable, and slow down the automation of China’s soil and soul.

SPEAKERS

Silvia LindtnerAssociate ProfessorSchool of InformationPenny W Stamps School of Art and DesignUNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN

Silvia Margot Lindtner (she/her) is Associate Professor at the University of Michigan in the School of Information and Director of the Center for Ethics, Society, and Computing (ESC). Lindtner’s research focuses on the cultures and politics of technology innovation, including the labor necessary to incubate entrepreneurial life and data-driven futures. Drawing from over a decade of multi-sited ethnographic research, she writes about China’s shifting position in the global political economy of computing, supply chains, industrial and agricultural production, and science and technology policy. She is the author of the award-winning book Prototype Nation: China and the Contested Promise of Innovation (Princeton University Press, 2020), and co-author of the multigraph Technoprecarious (Goldsmiths/MIT Press 2020). Lindtner is also a Visiting Associate Professor at NYU Shanghai, a CUSP (China-US Scholars Program) Fellow, and a fellow in the National Committee on United States-China Relations’ Public Intellectuals Program. Her research has been awarded support from the US National Science Foundation (NSF), IIE (the Institute of International Education), IMLS (Institute of Museum and Library Services), Intel Labs, Google Anita Borg, and the Chinese National Natural Science Foundation. Her work has appeared at ST&HV (Science, Technology, and Human Values), ESTS (Engaging Science, Technology and Society), SocialText, Women’s Studies Quarterly, China Information, ToCHI, ACM SIGCHI (Human-Computer Interaction), and has been covered by the Economist, New York Magazine, NPR, The Atlantic, Wired, the MIT Technology Review, and more.

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