Apr 29 (4pm) Natasha Iskander (NYU), Does Skill Make Us Human?: Migrant Workers in 21st-Century Qatar and Beyond (Princeton University Press, 2021). An in-depth look at Qatar’s migrant workers and the place of skill in the language of control and power, in Qatar’s booming construction industry, in the lead-up to the 2022 World Cup, showing how skill distinctions are used to limit freedom, narrow political rights, and even deny access to imagination and desire, and revealing how skill functions as a marker of social difference powerful enough to structure all aspects of social and economic life. (The Global Gulf and Bangladesh). Discussants: Neha Vora and Rachel Sturman. Co-sponsored by the Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies. 

RECORDING

Natasha N. Iskander, Associate Professor of Urban Planning and Public Service, conducts research on the relationship between migration and economic development. She looks at the ways that immigration and the movement of people across borders can provide the basis for the creation of new knowledge and of new pathways for political change.  She has published widely on these questions, looking specifically at immigration, skill, economic development, and worker rights. Her first book, Creative State: Forty Years of Migration and Development Policy in Morocco and Mexico (Cornell University Press, ILR imprint, 2010), looked at the ways that migrant workers transformed the economic development policies of their countries of origin. Her forthcoming book, Does Skill Make Us Human?: Migrant Workers in 21st Century Qatar and Beyond (Princeton University Press, 2021), examines the use of skill categories to define political personhood, in ways that have become increasingly salient with the hardening borders and the pressures of climate change. 

Neha Vora is Associate Professor of Anthropology in the Department of Anthropology & Sociology at Lafayette College. Her research and teaching interests include migration, citizenship, higher education, South Asian and Muslim diasporas, gender, liberalism, political economy, and the state, in the Arabian Peninsula region and in the United States. She is the author of Impossible Citizens: Dubai’s Indian Diaspora (Duke University Press, 2013) and Teach for Arabia: American Universities, Liberalism, and Transnational Qatar (Stanford University Press, 2018). She has also recently published a co-authored book with Ahmed Kanna and Amelie Le Renard, Beyond Exception: New Interpretations of the Arabian Peninsula (Cornell University Press, 2020).

Rachel Sturman is Associate Professor of History & Asian Studies at Bowdoin College. Her work has centered on law, property, and the legal subjecthood of minoritized persons in colonial India and in the indentured labor diaspora, and more recently on urban materiality, labor, and embodied expertise in the city of Mumbai. She is the author of The Government of Social Life in Colonial India: Liberalism, Religious Law & Women’s Rights (Cambridge, 2012), as well as scholarly articles in Comparative Studies in Society & History, The American Historical Review, and other journals. She is currently writing a monograph on the history of the building construction industry in 20th & 21st century Mumbai.

RECORDING

Apr 15. (12pm) Neelima Jeychandran (Penn State)  Verge: Studies in Global Asias 8.1 (Feb-Mar 2022), is a special issue on “Indian Ocean Studies, Afro-Asian Affinities,” co-edited by Emmanuel Bruno Jean-Francois (Penn State) & Neelima Jeychandran (Penn State). (Afro-Asia Interactions). This special issue investigates how creative works and aesthetic expressions represent African-Asian affinities in several parts of the Indian Ocean world. Contributions featured in this issue engage with a wide array of objects and practices—including music and dance, poetry and novels, paintings and architectural designs—and consider how they simultaneously capture and shape the imaginary of the Indian Ocean as a space that generates complex definitions of transcultural, translocal, and transnational contacts. Discussants: Dilip Menon and Prita Meier.

RECORDING

Neelima Jeychandran is an Assistant Teaching Professor in the Department of Asian Studies and the African Studies Program at the Pennsylvania State University. She works on visual cultures, material heritage, performances, architectures of memory, and spatial (re)fabulation of legacies of slavery and more general trade in West and East Africa and South Asia. She has done extensive fieldwork in southwestern India and has written articles on transoceanic consciousness and African historical landscapes in Kerala and Gujarat. She is the co-convenor of the research group Indian Oceanologies, a multi-campus working group that explores contemporary lives, spaces, and relational practices in the Indian Ocean. She is co-editor of the book Reimagining Indian Ocean Worlds (2020) and co-editor for the Routledge Series on the Indian Ocean and Trans-Asia. 

Emmanuel Bruno Jean-François is an Associate Professor of French and Francophone Studies and Comparative Literature at The Pennsylvania State University, and the author of Poétiques de la violence et récits francophones contemporains (Brill, 2017).  Jean-François’ research and teaching are in the fields of comparative francophonies and postcolonial literatures, with a specific focus on the study of violence, migration and transnational identities, multi-ethnic societies and creolization, island literatures and Indian Ocean studies. He has guest-edited special issues of Contemporary French and Francophone Studies, and Cultural Dynamics, among others; and has published over thirty book chapters and articles in a variety of journals including the PMLA and the International Journal of Francophone Studies. His current book in progress is an interdisciplinary study of contemporary literary and expressive cultures from the Mascarene Islands, with a particular focus on marine and terraqueous environments as ecological contexts for alternative conceptions of creolization and transoceanic solidarities.

Dilip Menon does research in World Literatures, Cultural History and Cultural Anthropology. His earlier research engaged with issues of caste, socialism and equality in modern India. His ongoing project for the last decade has involved thinking with oceanic histories and epistemologies from the global south. This work has resulted in three edited volumes beginning with Capitalisms: Towards a Global History (Oxford University Press, 2020); a global history of capitalisms from the 10th to the 18th century extending from China, India and SE Asia to the Ottoman, Safavid and Russian empires. Two volumes forthcoming this year are Changing Theory: Concepts from the Global South (Routledge, 2022) and Ocean as Method: Thinking with the Maritime (Routledge, 2022). He is also translator from the Malayalam and writes on film, theatre and literature.

Prita Meier is Associate Professor of Art History at NYU. She an Africanist art and architectural historian who looks at visual culture and built space through the lenses of circulation, empire and globalization.  Her areas of research interest are art and architecture of Africa; port cities and visual cultures of the Indian Ocean world; comparative urbanism; the cultural dimension of globalization; modernity in Africa; Islamic arts of Africa; histories of photography in Africa. Her book, Swahili Port Cities: The Architecture of Elsewhere (Indiana University Press, 2016), explores the contested meanings of the built landscape of still-thriving eastern African ports, including Mombasa, Lamu, and Zanzibar. She co-edited World on the Horizon: Swahili Arts across the Indian Ocean (Krannert Art Museum, 2017) with Allyson Purpura.

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