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Manisha Anantharaman, Department of Environmental Science Policy & Management, UC Berkeley. Manisha's research investigates middle class environmental politics in India, through a participatory and ethnographic study of bicycling and waste management communities in the city of Bangalore. Her research examines how sustainability practices and movements affect and transform class identities and relationships in the contemporary Indian city. Paper Title: Middle Class Waste, Working Class Hands: The Politics of Cleaning and Greening the Garden City |
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Hannah Archambault, Department of South and Southeast Asian Studies, U.C. Berkeley. Hannah’s dissertation research focuses on the Deccan-Karnatak frontier from the 17th-century Deccan Sultanates up to the establishment of British East India Company power at the end of the 18th century. Tracing a history of two Indo-Afghan noble families across this period, her work explores state systems, networks of patronage, kinship, and friendship, and the politics of identity. She has recently completed sixteen months of SSRC-IDRF and Fulbright-IIE supported fieldwork in India and London. Paper Title: Friendship as Origin Myth and as History in 17th-19th century South India |
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Aimée Douglas Caffrey. Aimée’s dissertation project is an anthropological study of heritage politics, identification, recognition, and practices of historical narration with regard to Sri Lanka’s so-called traditional handicraft industries. Her research is based on eighteen months of ethnographic fieldwork among weavers and other artisans in two “craft villages” in the country’s central province. Paper Title: When “Heritage” Hits the Ground: Precariousness and Paradox in Sri Lanka’s “Traditional Industries” |
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Elizabeth Mount, Department of Sociology, Syracuse University. Liz's research interests include transnational feminist theory and praxis, queer and gender studies and ethnography. Her dissertation research, which was generously supported by the American Institute for Indian Studies, explores how relationships of mutual need between sexual rights NGOs and their constituents affect communities of sexual minorities in South India. Paper Title: Exchanges of Mutual Need and the Re-production of Marginality: NGOs and Working-class Transmen and Lesbians in South India |
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Aditi Saraf, Department of Anthropology, Johns Hopkins University. Her research lies at the intersection of religion, sovereignty and commerce in India- controlled Kashmir through the particular ways in which political violence of the region impact the livelihood practices and collective mobilization of traders there. She combines archival study with ethnographic work to study how the history of trade networks and economic regulation in the region leave their traces in ideas of community, economic self-sufficiency and political dependence in the present. Paper Title: Knots of Trade: Promissory Payments in Srinagar’s Wholesale Market |
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Ishani Saraf, Department of Anthropology (Socio-Cultural), UC Davis. Her project researches scrap markets and scrap trade in the city of Delhi, India. Her M.Phil in Sociology from the Delhi School of Economics focused on the conceptions, materiality, and effects of nuclear waste. Paper Title: Contingency and Survivability: Regimes of Precarity in a scrap market in Delhi |
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Aarti Sethi, Department of Anthropology, Columbia University. Aarti researches the intersection of transnational capitalist agrarian transformation and choices about life and death in forest dwelling and peasant communities in central India. Her current work focuses on the social and psychic histories of debt in the cotton-fields of Vidarbha. Additionally she has written about and has ongoing interests in urban popular culture, technologies of representation and the politics of media forms. Paper Title: Fluid Exchange |
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Karin Shankar, Department of Theatre, Dance and Performance Studies, UC Berkeley. Karin's dissertation is titled An Alternate Perceptual Politics: Contemporary Experimental Performance and Art in New Delhi. Her research interests include contemporary performance and visual culture in South Asia, public art and social practice, political economies of culture, feminist theory and aesthetics, minoritarian avant-gardes, new media and film theory. She is currently co-editing a collection titled P(art)icipatory Urbanisms on the aesthetics and politics of urban participation, supported by an award from the Mellon Foundation’s Global Urban Humanities Initiative. Paper Title: Unfolding’ Gurgaon in Jagannath Panda’s Art |
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Sudev Sheth, Departments of South Asia Studies & History, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia. Sudev's current research investigates connections between elite banking households, financial capital, and regional state formation in western India during the late eighteenth-century. Before joining Penn, he studied South Asian literature, history, anthropology, and music at the Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi and the University of California at Berkeley. |
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Elizabeth Sibilia, The Graduate Center, City University of New York. Elizabeth's dissertation research examines the historical-geographic, political-economic, and social factors that helped to produce and perpetuate the global landscape of shipbreaking in Chittagong, Bangladesh. Archival data, photographic documentation, interviews, policy papers and reports, legal documents and scholarly work are the methods and sources used to build this ‘toxic history of the present.’ Recently, she was awarded a Dissertation Year Fellowship from the Graduate Center, in addition to receiving the following grants to support her fieldwork: the ARC American Studies Archival Research Award (2015), American Institute of Bangladesh Studies Pre- dissertation Fellowship (2014), and funding from the Human Geography Small Grant Program (2014). Paper Title: Space, Labor, and Law: The global production of a landscape for shipbreaking in Chittagong, Bangladesh and the problem of ‘waste’ |
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William F. Stafford, Jr., Department of Anthropology, UC Berkeley. William's research focuses on the auto-rickshaw meter in New Delhi, as a way to engage with classical questions concerning the relationship between measurement, quantification and delimitations of domains of labour. His prior work has focused on forced and bonded labour, and the jurisprudence and metrology of the minimum wage and the poverty line in India. William's general interests concern the analytics of labour and the reconfiguration of what are often taken as its axiomatic aspects. Before joining Berkeley, he studied Sociology at the Centre for the Study of Social Systems at Jawaharlal Nehru University and the Department of Sociology at the Delhi School of Economics. Paper Title: A Polemics of Equality and the Equivalence of Bodies |
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Gowri Vijayakumar, Department of Sociology, UC Berkeley. Gowri's research interests include gender, labor, sexuality, feminist theory and politics, the sociology of development, and the critical study of medicine. In her dissertation, she explores the relationships between sex worker activists and HIV/AIDS funders in India and Kenya. A prior project examined the shifting aspirations of small-town young people in relation to new-middle-class imaginaries and the knowledge economy in India. Her work has appeared in Gender & Society and Global Labour Journal, and has received funding from the National Science Foundation and the Social Science Research Council. Paper Title: Is Sex Work Sex or is Sex Work Work? Intimate Exchange and the Making of the Sex Worker in Bangalore |
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H William Warner, Department of History, University of Wisconsin-Madison. William specialize in South Asian and Islamic history, but he is broadly interested in the history of early modern and modern empires, interregional migrations, and labor history. His dissertation concerns the Afghan diaspora in British India, c. 1800 and 1930. More particularly, he examine how Afghans adapted to changes in the South Asian socio-economic structure that attended British imperial ascent. Paper Title: Turbulent Tribes, British Rupees: Migrations, Remittances, and Resistances among Afghans in Colonial South Asia |
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Mitchell Winter, History of Art and Visual Culture, UC Santa Cruz. Mitchell’s current research examines issues of landscape, ideology, and representation as expressed in the art and literature of British colonists and Indians living under colonial rule during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. His previous research projects have focused on the politics of religious heritage in Tamil Nadu, the production of print culture in colonial Indian cotton mills, and the contemporary totalizing discourse of the United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization’s (UNESCO) World Heritage program. Before attending UCSC, he received degrees in Linguistics and Religious Studies from UC Davis Paper Title: Morass of Beauty, Soil, and Sea: Aporias of the Colonial ‘Picturesque’ in 19th century India |
