Global Asias
In 1896, the Ottoman sultan decreed that Armenians alone could emigrate, on condition they expatriate permanently and sit for a photograph. Professor Zeynep Devrim Gürsel discovered these expatriation portraits in the Ottoman state archives in Istanbul. Portraits of Unbelonging follows the individuals pictured over a century, from the files that unmade them as Ottoman subjects to the lives and descendants they left behind. Written in conversation with these descendants, the book offers both a genealogy of the document-based security regimes governing citizenship today and an intimate history of belonging.
Welcome to our monthly Virtual Panel Discussions! For this month we are turning our attention to spaces of learning in India and beyond.
Caste continues to shape who enters India's learning spaces, how they experience them, and what opportunities follow. This panel examines caste alongside religion, gender, and urban poverty to understand the layered exclusions that marginalized communities face in education. Wajda Tabassum draws on minority studies and Islamic feminism to analyze caste, stratification, and Muslim women's higher education. Shadab Anis explores how Muslim communities in Bihar's informal settlements navigate schooling and livelihoods at the intersection of caste and religious identity. Geetha M examines how policy and privatization have reshaped perceptions of access and participation in education. Together, the presentations span communities, schools, universities, and policy, highlighting both the structures that sustain exclusion and the everyday ways communities resist it.
Our Speakers are
Wajda Tabassum
Wajda Tabassum is a research scholar who has recently submitted her PhD thesis at the National Institute of Educational Planning and Administration (NIEPA), New Delhi, where she also completed her MPhil with distinction. An alumna of Jamia Millia Islamia and IGNOU, she has over six years of academic and project experience in education, sociology, caste, gender, minority studies, and public policy.
She is currently working as a Research Assistant at Inderprastha Engineering College, Ghaziabad, and has previously contributed to projects with the Giri Institute of Development Studies (ICSSR, Govt. of India), the National Commission for Minorities, Stanford University, Global Logic Pvt. Ltd. (Google ODC), and the Education Technology & Management Academy. Her publications include A Learner-Centric Curriculum for Equity and Inclusion (Routledge India, 2023), Muslim Women’s Empowerment through Higher Education (2025), and Advanced Sociological Perspectives on Education (2022).
Her research and writings highlight themes of migration, Islamic feminism, caste and social stratification, global education, and minority empowerment, reflecting her interdisciplinary approach and commitment to inclusive scholarship.
Shadab Anis
Shadab Anis, holds a M.Phil and PhD from National Institute of Educational Planning and Administration, New Delhi. His PhD attempts to investigate whether a fair opportunity of quality education and livelihood is spread evenly in the context of those living in the city's informal settlements. He completed Bachelors from Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi and holds double master's degree in Social Sciences from University of Delhi and Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, respectively.
He has worked as Research Associate CETE, TISS Mumbai, (SEWA) Bharat and Language and Learning Foundation, New Delhi. Currently he is doing freelance work based out of Nancy, France.
Geetha M
Geetha M is a PhD Candidate at the Centre of Excellence in Teacher Education, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai. With more than a decade of experience spanning across education, gender & labour in teaching, programme implementation, research and grassroots education initiatives, her work focuses on equity, access and educational transformation in India. She began her journey in education as a Teaching Fellow with Teach For India, where she taught children from underserved communities and helped build community-led learning spaces. During her work at RV Educational Consortium, she lead a four-year participatory action research project on whole-school improvement. She worked closely with schools, teachers, communities, and education departments to strengthen inclusive learning practices, teacher development, and school processes. Her previous publications and conference presentations engage with language teaching learning practices, teacher beliefs, and governance in education. She is also the cofounder of Haadibadi Community library in Bangalore that creates access to reading and creative learning opportunities for children and youth from marginalized communities. She was recognized as an Emerging International Voice for the Library Movement by the Goethe-Institut and the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions. Her doctoral research lies at the intersection of policy, regulation, privatisation and teacher workforce dynamics. She is currently affiliated at Michigan State University as a Fulbright Nehru Doctoral scholar.
The event is hosted by the Global Anti-Caste Thought Graduate Working Group, Global Asias, Rutgers University and co-hosted by Rutgers Anti-Caste Collective, previously referred to as Fatima Ambedkar Birsa Periyar Phule Savitribai Students and Workers Association, Rutgers University.
Archives of Intimacy: Racial Mixing and Chinese Lives in the Colonial Port City, 1905–1949
Archives of Intimacy offers a rich and innovative study of multiracial social worlds in early-twentieth-century London, Liverpool, and Hong Kong—three port cities linked by their importance to global British shipping networks and circuits of Chinese migration. In these cities, Chinese, Black, South Asian and European people came together to foster multiracial communities which have been largely forgotten, remembered only through sensationalist fictions that reflected white anxieties about racial mixing. Nadine Attewell considers these vibrant multiracial worlds through the eyes of those who knew them best: people of mixed Chinese descent, for whom interracial intimacies were features of everyday life.
Mobilizing a wide range of archival materials, including photographs, community and family histories, and wartime intelligence reports, Attewell reconstructs the social experiences of people like Vera Leung, a working-class woman of Irish and Chinese descent growing up in Liverpool's interwar Chinatown, and Percy Chang, a Jamaican man of Chinese and African descent with a wide social network in Hong Kong. Rather than centering identity as the focus of mixed-race people's struggles, she asks what they did and with whom. Drawing on queer and feminist scholarship and integrating British, Asian, and diasporic histories, Attewell presents new ways of thinking about the everyday meanings of interracial intimacy, and practices of relation and survival under global conditions of colonial capitalist rule.
Portraits of Unbelonging: Photographic Journeys Across Borders
A profound examination of how photographs can both sever and connect, tracing the paths of Ottoman Armenians across state and family archives.
In 1896 the Ottoman sultan issued a decree that allowed Armenians—and only Armenians—to emigrate on the condition that they expatriate and never return to their homeland. A key step in this process was sitting for a photograph. The Ottoman state archived the photographs; the Armenian migrants received passports and left for European ports, most of them bound for the United States. Between 1896 and 1908, more than four thousand Armenians sat for such expatriation photographs. Almost two decades before photographs were attached to passports anywhere in the world, Ottoman Armenian expatriation portraiture is one of the earliest examples of the use of surveillance photography for border control.
Zeynep Devrim Gürsel encountered these photographs in the Ottoman state archives in Istanbul, Turkey. Produced as documents of exclusion at a crucial moment in Ottoman and Armenian history, in Gürsel's hands they become invitations to learn from lives lived in radically uncertain times. Portraits of Unbelonging follows the stories of the individuals in these photographs over a century—from the bureaucratic files that unmade them as Ottoman subjects, to the ship manifests that tracked their migration routes and the naturalization records that documented their new lives as immigrants, and finally into the family albums and stories of their descendants living today. Written in conversation with these descendants, working across borders, Portraits of Unbelonging offers both a genealogy of the document-based global security regimes that govern citizenship and mobility today and an intimate history of unbelonging and belonging.
Worldly Afterlives: Tracing Family Trails Between India and Empire
The hidden histories of empire, told through the haunted afterlives of colonial migrations.
Indian migrants provided the labor that enabled the British Empire to gain control over a quarter of the world’s population and territory. In the mid-1800s, the British government began building an elaborate bureaucracy to govern its mobile subjects, issuing photo IDs, lists of kin, and wills. It amassed records of workers’ belongings such as handwritten IOUs, crumpled newspaper clippings, and copper bangles. Worldly Afterlives uses this trove of artifacts to recover the stories of the hidden subjects of empire.Navigating the remains of imperial bureaucracy—in archives scattered across Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and the Americas—Julia Stephens follows migrant families as they traverse the Indian Ocean and the British Empire. She draws on in-depth interviews to show how the histories of empire reverberate in the present through the memories and experiences of their descendants, who collected their own remnants of empire in albums and curio cabinets. We encounter women, subaltern migrants, and people of mixed heritage whose family stories upend ethnonationalist and patriarchal approaches to studying Asian diasporas. What emerges is a social history of Indian migration and a political history of British imperial governance, one that offers a new methodological approach to the historian’s craft.Spanning archives, family collections, cemeteries, online ancestry records, and social media, Worldly Afterlives breaks down boundaries that separate academic, amateur, and public history to open new conversations about the ongoing legacies of empire.A reception will follow the event.
Rutgers Meets Japan: A Celebration of Friendship will be held on Saturday, September 12th, 3:00-5:00 PM, at the Kirkpatrick Chapel, Rutgers University, to commemorate the 150th Anniversary of the publication of The Mikado's Empire and the 100th anniversary of the bestowal of the Order of the Rising Sun by the Emperor of Japan upon William Elliot Griffis (Rutgers Class of 1869). Join us to celebrate the 150 years of intellectual and cultural exchange between Rutgers-New Brunswick and Japan!
Also held in conjunction is Japan In/Out of View at the Zimmerli Art Museum. See this article on Rutgers Today featuring Haruko Wakabayashi.
The event is co-sponsored by the SAS Asian Languages and Cultures Department, Rutgers Foundation, Rutgers Global, Rutgers University Libraries, Zimmerli Art Museum, Global Asias Initiative, and the Rutgers Japanese Student Association. It is funded through grants and donations from the New Jersey Historical Commission, Japanese Chamber of Commerce & Industry in New York, the Japanese American Association of New York, and Ito-en.
