Feminist Futures in the Indian Ocean (Santa Cruz, 15-16 May 2020)
Date: May 15-16, 2020

Location: University of California, Santa Cruz

Deadline: January 1, 2020

Although the Indian Ocean has been conceptualized as a connected space of trade and migration, scholarship has yet to fully engage the material realities of ecologies, subjectivities, memory, the sensorial, the spiritual, and the archival. Scholarship has further unevenly prioritized certain regions and relations within this oceanic space (the Indian sub-continent), while others continue to be marginalized (relationships between the coasts, hinterlands, and archipelagoes of Africa, South Asia, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East).

We welcome papers that question silences and erasures within Indian Ocean studies and its archives, and attend to embodied and non-hegemonic forms of knowledge production. How can feminist methods, necessarily connective, comparative and embodied, decenter and decolonize scholarly praxis of the Indian Ocean? How can they further attend to the nuanced relationalities between spaces, times, and disciplines? What might it mean to map the relational links between the Indian Ocean and other oceanic contexts (e.g., the Atlantic, Pacific, Mediterranean, and Caribbean)? We are particularly interested in papers that engage thick transregionalism, multidisciplinary approaches to archives, historical memories of colonialism, racialization, slavery, indenture, and diaspora, and foreground questions of embodiment, performance, and visual and material cultural practices..

Papers might consider any of the following, as well as other related topics:

affect and the sensory

archive(s) and memory

area studies

colonialisms

cultural studies

economies and circulation

embodiment

environments and ecologies

feminist methodologies

gender and sexualities

histories and afterlives of slavery

indigenous and diasporic solidarities

materials and materialities

maritime imperialisms

mobility and diaspora

performance and the performative

racializations

reflective research praxis

religions

thick transregionalism

transoceanic connections

visual and material practices

Abstract Submission

We invite abstracts for papers, performances, and other artistic interventions that address any of the above goals and themes. The deadline for paper abstracts is 1 January 2020. Abstract submissions should include your name, institutional affiliation, contact, paper title, an abstract of no more than 250 words, and a brief biographical note.

To submit your application, follow this link: https://forms.gle/gwNPpDUq6dajjG2s7

Travel Funding

We are committed to creating an inclusive space for discussion among scholars at the early stages of their careers. The Feminist Futures in the Indian Ocean Conference will offer a limited number of grants to offset travel fees. Please indicate you would like to be considered for a travel grant in the online application. We anticipate awarding a handful of grants between $200-300.

Contact Info:
For more information about the conference, please contact the conference committee electronically at fiowconf@gmail.com.

Contact Email:
fiowconf@gmail.com

“Remaking Worlds:The Geographical Imagination Of Global Asias Through Art & Visual Culture” Summer Institute (State College, 15-19 June 2020)

Penn State University invites applicants for its annual Global Asias Summer Institute, to be held June 15-19, 2020. This year’s Institute, co-directed by Laura Kina (DePaul University) and Chang Tan (Penn State), focuses on the geographical imagination of Global Asias through art and visual culture.

Institute participants spend a week reading and thinking about the annual theme, as well as significant time workshopping their work in progress. Particularly strong work will be considered for publication in an upcoming special issue on “Visualizing Asias” (issue 8.2) of the award-winning journal, Verge: Studies in Global Asias (https://www.upress.umn.edu/journal-division/journals/verge-studies-in-global-asias).

Penn State will cover housing and most meals, and offer an honorarium to help defray travel costs (USD 400 from the East Coast, 600 from the Midwest, 800 from the West Coast; USD 1000 from Europe; USD 1350 from Asia). Applicants must have completed their PhDs no earlier than June 2015, or be advanced graduate students who are completing their dissertations.

On the theme:

Maps traditionally function to draw territorial boundaries; assist with navigation; document physical geographies; and to visualize, render, and measure scientific data and “facts.” Art’s relationship to mapping foregrounds different goals such as documenting hidden histories and telling alternative narratives; standing in as a historical witness to resist revisionist history; functioning as a memorial to honor vanished spaces, places and peoples; challenging a viewer’s relationship to their environment and providing a new way of understanding their positionality; expressing symbolic form to convey impact and to document affect; and creating formats for collaboration and engagement. In other words, to envision Global Asias through art demands a leap of imagination that goes beyond and intervenes in the conventions and goals of representational cartography.

In the 2020 Global Asias Summer Institute, we explore the role of art and visual culture in the formation and revamping of the geographic imaginations of Asia and its diasporas, especially as such artistic production “overlaps a more tangible geography and helps shape our attitude to peoples and places” (Said, 1978). Specifically, how do art and visual culture document, decipher, and reinvent the haunted landscapes of war and migration and removal, the processes of deterritorialization and reterritorialization, the mapping of diaspora, or the emergence of alternative transpacifics? And how might artistic imagination and practice archive, dissemble, and interfere with the rapidly changing environments and habitats of the anthropocene, the glocal march of urbanization and gentrification, or the exploitation and injustice that accompanies the expropriation of land?

The institute aims to consider broadly the connections and tensions between the visual and the geographic in Asia and the Asian diaspora. We invite artists, curators, and scholars to address issues that include, but are not limited to, the following:

How landscape, in myriad media and materiality, helps shape the imaginaries of the local, the national, the regional, and the global;
Landscape’s vexed relationship to the sublime, manifest destiny, and settler-colonialism;
Haunted landscapes, memories of war, affective space in art and visual culture;
How land and its residents are conceived and visualized in the colonial and postcolonial context, tackling issues such as military occupation and deterritorialization;
How the visual and the cartographic participate in discourses of land ownership, urban development, indigeneity, and boundaries;
How art and visual cultures envision Oceanic conceptions of shared waterways to reflect real and imagined transpacific communities;
Ecocriticism and eco-activism in the art and visual culture of Asia;
Critical practices that trace displacement, movement, immigration and refugees;
The politicization of aesthetics and the affective dimension of political activism.

To apply, please send the following documents to vergevents@psu.edu by March 6, 2020. Items #1-3 must be sent as a single PDF file; the recommendation letter for applications from advanced graduate students may be sent separately.

An abstract of 1500 words outlining research project and clarifying its
connection to the Institute theme.

A sample of current work.
A current c.v. (no longer than 2 pp).
A letter from a principal advisor about the advanced status of work (in the case of graduate students).

Decisions will be made by April 3, 2020. Inquiries regarding the Summer Institute may be directed to Chang Tan (cut12@psu.edu) or the Global Asias Initiative (vergevents@psu.edu).

Call for Papers: Workshop on Indian Ocean Port Cities and Their Hinterlands

Applications are invited for a Research and Orientation Workshop to be held in Kolkata from 25 November to 29 November 2019. The workshop will be organised by the Calcutta Research Group (CRG) in collaboration with the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung. It will address issues of protection for refugees and migrants, gender, race, religion and other faultlines in the protection regime, neo-liberalism and migrant labour, statelessness, borderlands and the Indian and South Asian experiences in a global context.

Research papers or creative pieces such as photo exhibits or documentaries relevant to the themes mentioned above will have to be presented by selected participants in the workshop which will deliberate on the findings. Reports prepared in the working group discussions will be presented in a plenary conference with which the programme will end.

Applicants must have (a) experience in research work in migration and forced migration studies or policy work in relevant areas, or, at least 5 years’ experience in the work for protection of migrants and victims of forced migration, and (b) proficiency in English. Besides giving all necessary particulars an application must be accompanied by two recommendation letters and a 1000 word write up on how the applicant’s work is relevant to the themes of the workshop. Selected participants from South Asia will have to pay a registration fee of INR 6000 (or USD 100) and from outside South Asia USD 500. CRG will provide boarding and lodging for six nights. Applications may be addressed to Aditi Mukherjee by email at forcedmigrationdesk@mcrg.ac.in with a copy to subhashree@mcrg.ac.in or by post to: IA-48, Ground Floor, Sector-III, Salt Lake City, Kolkata-700097, India (Tel: +91 33 2335 0409). The last date for submission of applications is 31 March 2019. Inquiries related to the application process are welcome. Application form can be downloaded from the CRG website – www.mcrg.ac.in

CRG enjoys extensive experience of running workshops on issues of forced migration, racism, and xenophobia.  Please see the past programmes section of CRG website (http://www.mcrg.ac.in/winter.asp) for details.  

International Workshop “Ports & People in Commodity History”

Place: Glasgow
Host/Organizer: Jelmer Vos, University of Glasgow
Date: 05.06.2019 – 06.06.2019
Deadline: 31.01.2019

The workshop is a collaborative venture between the Commodities of Empire British Academy Research Project and the University of Glasgow. Following the past practice of Commodities of Empire workshops, papers will be grouped in thematic panels, pre-circulated to workshop participants, and discussed in the first instance by a panel chair or discussant. Paper-givers will then have the right to reply succinctly, and this will be followed by open discussion. Papers presented at the workshop may be considered for publication in the Commodities of Empire Working Papers series: https://commoditiesofempire.org.uk/publications/working-papers/.

Please e-mail expressions of interest, with a title and an abstract of no more than 300 words, by 31 January 2019 to Jelmer Vos, University of Glasgow, jelmer.vos@glasgow.ac.uk.

Assistant Professor in History – Pre-Modern China, Department of History, NYU

Assistant Professor for Pre-Modern Indian Ocean History at NYU Gallatin.

Call for Applications (link):

“The Indian Ocean World and Eurasian Connections”

Summer School, July 30-August 12, 2018,

Center for Global Asia, New York University
Shanghai, China

The Center for Global Asia at New York University, Shanghai in China and the Center for
Interdisciplinary Area Studies (ZIRS) at the Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg in Germany,
collaboratively offer a series of three interconnected Summer Schools on the topic of “The Indian
Ocean World and Eurasian Connections.” The series is funded through a grant from the
Volkswagen Foundation.

After two successful Summer Schools in July 2016 and 2017, applications are now invited for the
third Summer School in 2018, which will take place in Shanghai, July 30-August 12, 2018. It will
focus on the sub-theme of “Archaeology, Cultural Heritage, and Contemporary
Connectivities of Indian Ocean History.”