Graduate Working Groups

Global Asias Anti-Caste Thought 

Conveners: Manohar Boda, (New Brunswick-Anthropology) This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Nayana Kirasur, (New Brunswick-Library and Information Science This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Fiona Vaz, (New Brunswick-Education) This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Faculty: Ryan Smith (New Brunswick-Linguistics) This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Caste in South Asia and beyond, while often dismissed as a relic of the past, continues to be prevalent in the subcontinent and among its diasporas around the world. The demands for protections against it with governments (Kaur, 2023) and universities across the United States, including Rutgers, have only underscored the global nature of caste-based discrimination. Our working group continues to organize anti-caste panel discussions dedicated to interdisciplinary anti-caste perspectives that, on the one hand, challenge the naturalization of caste-based domination and, on the other, foreground anti-caste thought, practice, and futures.

Modern Asias: Rethinking Mobility, Intimacy, and Surveillance

Conveners: Amrita Mukherjee (New Brunswick-History) This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. 

Eleanor Lenoe-Williams (New Brunswick-History) This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Faculty: Chie Ikeya (New Brunswick-History) This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

By placing intimacy and mobility in conversation with surveillance and security, the Working Group investigates how colonial and postcolonial states monitor populations and movement across borders and communities. The group explores questions of policing, archives, intelligence networks, border regimes, digital technologies, political violence, militarization, and racialized or gendered governance. The group is particularly interested in how practices of security and surveillance intersect with gender and sexuality, shaping everyday experiences of citizenship, migration, labor, belonging, and resistance across different Asian and diasporic contexts.

Queer Transnational Labor: Asian Diasporas and the America(s)

Conveners: Ariel Chung (Newark-American Studies) This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.;

Cyrus Gray (Newark-American Studies) lqg6This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Faculty: Keish Kim (Newark-American Studies and English)  This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

From forced labor migration of coolies during colonialism to gay Filipino communities in New York City at the turn-of-the-century, this working group seeks to interrogate the cause and methods of (im)mobility between Asia and the America(s) through gendered labor. We trace the shaping of identity and culture from the 19th century to present in transnational movements of laboring bodies and goods between Asia (broadly envisioned to include East Asia, Southeast Asia, South Asia, and the Middle East) and the America(s). In analyzing how queer theory, cultural studies, and migration studies cross-pollinate each other, our working group seeks to understand what it means to forge queer community in the Americas.