Graduate Working Groups

Cold War Asias: Connections and Mobilities through post-WWII Asias

“Cold War Asias” serves as an inter/transdisciplinary working group for graduate students interested in the entangled histories of modern Asia, Asian America(s), and the world, with World War II and the Cold War as the primary chronological backdrop. We examine movements of people, ideas, and goods from/to/through Asia.

Decolonization in South Asia: Borderlands, Heritage, and Cultural Politics

Continuing our conversations from last year, we plan to engage with contemporaneous debates around identity formation through cultural production, with a focus on South Asian and inter-Asian borderland politics. We will continue to interrogate the process of decolonization in South Asia that formally began in 1947 with Independence from British colonial rule and which continues to determine the contemporary politics of the region. The group’s focus on borderlands is guided by the desire to place the discontents of the periphery against the postcolonial nation-state center-stage, such that the subcontinent’s political boundaries are not given but rather viewed as constructed, resisted, and negotiated in a decades-long process of decolonization.”

Contacts: Pritha Mukherjee (This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.); Sneha Khaund (This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.)

Global Anti-Caste Thought

This working group seeks to deepen our engagement with the intellectual history of radical anti-caste thought and asks how we can build on these foundations to combat current forms of global casteism and virulent Hindutva. While primarily drawing on the legacies of well-known anti-caste thinkers like Phule, Ambedkar and Periyar, we also seek to center the work of lesser-known anti-caste thinkers from marginalized communities in India.

Contacts: Sahithya Venkatesan (This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.); Thomas Crowley (This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.); Jeffrey Immanuel Jebastin (This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.)

Nature and Urbanization in Global Asias: A Perspective Beyond Neoliberalism

Our working group aims to evaluate the environmental risks of urbanization faced by Asian developing countries. Through interdisciplinary collaboration between environmental humanities and geographical studies, we hope to find a perception of city development beyond the preoccupation with neoliberalism.

Contacts: Xingming Wang (This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.); Sauvanithi Yupho (This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.)

Women, Violence and Crime in Asia and its Diasporas

This working group focuses on women’s experiences with crime, victimization, and deviance. We explore the diverse contexts through which violence against women in India has been portrayed through stereotypes by media, policy makers, and researchers. Individual papers draw on a range of methods and data (ethnographic field observations, in-depth interviews, official statistics, secondary data, new articles) to provide an overview of women’s experiences with gender-based violence, human trafficking and sex work.

Contact: Popy Begum (This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.)