As South Asia experiences rapid and unprecedented transformation, both scholarly and public interest in the region has grown dramatically in recent years. A large new generation of graduate students working on South Asia in the humanities and social sciences is in the process of rethinking approaches to the study of South Asian culture, society, politics, economics, law, history, literature, and the arts. This year we focus on the theme of Precarious Exchange: Materiality, Network, & Value in South Asia in the World. The fourth annual conference, held this year at the University of California, Berkeley, is jointly planned by a consortium of four universities: Stanford, the University of California, Berkeley, the University of California, Davis, and the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Precarious Exchange: Materiality, Network, & Value in South Asia in the World seeks to explore questions of exchange, value and relation across the disciplines and in reference to “South Asia” in the world. From body to household, community to nation state and world system, exchanges are fraught with the intensifying demands of security and moral urgency, laden with the real and spurious promise of wealth, beauty, and enhanced selfhood, and legitimated through proliferating metrics governing information and informality. In the present and, both critical and mindful of the present's demands, in other times, questions of exchange open out to broader matters of concern. They shape debate on government, ethics, and corruption, on aesthetics and on embodiment, and on care and on abandonment through relations involving humans and others. They determine or are determined by borders and regions. They engage the futures of political thought and political economy. They help us reappraise and reimagine earlier thinking on the formation of “South Asian Studies” within and across disciplines.
We are particularly interested in close, careful analysis, rooted in one’s academic formation, that draws on and innovates interdisciplinary debate in contemporary critical and cultural theory.
While the conference will be open to the public, it is primarily designed to create a much-needed space for connecting conversations between graduate students working on issues of value, materiality, and exchange within South Asia and for providing close feedback from consortium faculty. With these goals in mind, the conference will be organized along the lines of an intensive seminar with an emphasis on dialogue and critical exchange.
South Asia by the Bay inaugurates an unprecedented collaboration among several universities within California: Stanford University, University of California, Berkeley, University of California, Davis, and University of California, Santa Cruz.We aim to establish an annual forum where graduate students from across disciplines and institutions in North America, who work on South Asia, can meet to discuss their work with each other, and with South Asia affiliated faculty from the organizing institutions and beyond. Besides keynotes by important scholars in the field, we will hold interactive sessions with faculty on the international job market in South Asian studies, film screenings, and social events.
