Fourth Annual White Rose South Asia Conference: Space, Place, and Temporalities

Tom Shillam Announcement
Location
United Kingdom
Subject Fields
Asian History / Studies, Borderlands, Colonial and Post-Colonial History / Studies, Humanities, South Asian History / Studies

India’s controversial Citizenship Amendment Act of December 2019, which offers amnesty to non-Muslim religious minorities from Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan, was announced by the federal government ostensibly to protect religious minorities fleeing persecution from these three Muslim-majority countries. This law highlights a political climate where forms of nationalism are terrifyingly resurging and state borders are being redefined and contested the world over. 

To this end, the White Rose South Asia Network presents their Fourth Annual Conference on the theme of ‘Space, Place and Temporalities’. This one-day event will bring together postgraduate students from across the arts, humanities and social sciences to consider various aspects of South Asian society.

Space is constitutive of social relations, political action and cultural identity (Massey 1994). How do South Asianists from different disciplines illustrate the complex negotiation and fluidity between different kinds of spaces in South Asia: whether public-private, rural-urban, sacred-secular, provincial-cosmopolitan, or local-global? Spatiality and practices of placeness have been central to a diversity of humanities and social science research on South Asia: whether histories of labour and labouring contexts, studies of the ecology and environment, women’s practices of place-making (Grodzins Gold, 2014), or in ethnomusicology and performance studies. From the perspective of language, culture, and religion, space and place are also intimately connected to issues of identity and mobility, as well as with practices of memorialisation and commemoration. 

We encourage submissions from research students – MA and PhD – and Early Career Researchers from across all disciplines. Submissions can be in the standard format of 20-minute academic paper presentations or non-traditional interactive presentations involving visual art, poetry, cinema, posters, audience participation, etc. 

Themes may include, but are not restricted to:

  • pre-colonial, colonial and postcolonial histories;
  • migration, mobilities, and diaspora;
  • literature, arts and films;
  • contemporary politics, development and governance;
  • gender studies;
  • religious and cultural studies;
  • medical humanities;
  • environment and ecology;
  • cartography and geography;
  • and comparative studies of South Asian regions and economies.

We especially encourage submissions that critically evaluate the tensions between the space of everyday life and the larger macro-scale of space of the region and the nation-state.

We may also host a poster competition. Participants can either send in their posters to be displayed online ahead of the conference or can include their posters as part of their presentations. We hope this will allow those not speaking an opportunity to present their research. 

We hope to encourage submissions from diverse, interdisciplinary backgrounds. To this end, we will be running a workshop about navigating academia as a BAME researcher in the UK. This workshop will be open for anyone to attend. The conference is likely to take place online or as a ‘blended’ event where some papers are presented in-person and some over the internet. It will take place on 30 April 2021; please keep abreast of our website and Twitter page (@SouthAsiaConf21) for further updates. 

PROPOSAL SUBMISSION

Contact Information

Tom Shillam, University of York, Department of History

Contact Email
whiterosesouthasiagraduate@gmail.com