Events
Public Lecture: Sunil Gupta, ‘From Here to Eternity – Race, Migration and Queer Identity’
Wednesday 12th February, 2020
6:00 pm, QMUL Mile End Campus, Arts One LT
In this South Asia Forum public lecture, photographer and curator Sunil Gupta will critically address issues of race, migration and queer identity with a focus on India in relation to his photographic practice since the 1970s. Over the last thirty years, Gupta’s work has focused on agency and empowerment in India’s gay communities, where until September 2018 homosexuality was a criminal act under colonial-era law, punishable with ten years of imprisonment. RSVP via Eventbrite here: qmsunilgupta.eventbrite.com
CLSGC Symposium: On Renisa Mawani’s ‘Across Oceans of Law’
Tuesday 3rd March, 2020
4:00 pm, Room 313, School of Law
The CLSGC is delighted to be hosting an interdisciplinary symposium on Professor Renisa Mawani’s Across Oceans of Law.
Professor Mawani is Professor of Sociology at the University of British Columbia. Professor Mawani will introduce the book, and this will be followed by comments and discussion.
Commentators: Dr Luis Eslava (Kent, TBC); Professor Laleh Khalili (QMUL); Professor Stewart Motha (Birkbeck); Dr Simon Layton (QMUL); and Dr Surabhi Ranganathan (University of Cambridge).
Chaired by Dr Eva Nanopoulos (QMUL) and organised by Professor Maks Del Mar (QMUL).
Renisa Mawani is Professor of Sociology and Chair of the Law and Society Program at the University of British Columbia. She works in the fields of critical theory and colonial legal history and has published widely on law, colonialism, and legal geography. She is the author of Colonial Proximities (University of British Columbia Press, 2009) and Across Oceans of Law (Duke University Press, 2018). With Iza Hussin, she is co-editor of “The Travels of Law: Indian Ocean Itineraries” published in Law and History Review (2014); with Sheila Giffen and Christopher Lee she is co-editor of “Worlds at Home: On Cosmopolitan Futures” published in Journal of Intercultural Studies (2019); with Rita Dhamoon, Davina Bhandar, and Satwinder Bains, she is co-editor of Unmooring the Komagata Maru (University of British Columbia Press, 2019); and with Antoinette Burton, she is co-editor of Animalia: An Anti-Imperial Bestiary of Our Times (Duke University Press, 2020). She has served two terms on the editorial board of Law and Society Review, was recently appointed to the editorial board of Law and Social Inquiry, and was elected to the Law and Society Association’s Board of Trustees (2019-2022). In 2015-2016, she received the Killam Prize for Graduate Teaching, a Dean of Arts Faculty Research Award, and was a Wall Scholar at the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies.
For more information on this event, please email lawevents@qmul.ac.uk.
Public Lecture: Renisa Mawani, ‘Turning Nationals into Foreigners: The Ingress into India Ordinance’
Thursday 5th March, 2020
6:00 pm, Arts Two LT
RSVP via Eventbrite by clicking here.
The 2019-20 Cotterrell Lecture in Sociological Jurisprudence: In this lecture Professor Renisa Mawani will trace the emergence, development, and consequences of the Ingress into India Ordinance across colonial India, Burma, and Siam. Issued by the Indian colonial government in September 1914, in direct response to the anticipated arrival of the Komagata Maru, the ordinance afforded unprecedented power to Indian authorities. It allowed local police and magistrates to apprehend, arrest, and detain anyone suspected of seditious and anti-British sentiments, thereby unleashing a violent expression of juridical power that was justified through the onset of World War I. What is notable in the longer history of India’s ordinances is the prominent role of the sea.
In this lecture, Professor Mawani will read the oceanic elements of the Ingress and trace its expansive reach across the Bay of Bengal – from India to Burma and Siam – through the lives of Indian merchants suspected of sedition and radicalism abroad.
Renisa Mawani is Professor of Sociology and Chair of the Law and Society Program at the University of British Columbia. She works in the fields of critical theory and colonial legal history and has published widely on law, colonialism, and legal geography. She is the author of Colonial Proximities (University of British Columbia Press, 2009) and Across Oceans of Law (Duke University Press, 2018). With Iza Hussin, she is co-editor of “The Travels of Law: Indian Ocean Itineraries” published in Law and History Review (2014); with Sheila Giffen and Christopher Lee she is co-editor of “Worlds at Home: On Cosmopolitan Futures” published in Journal of Intercultural Studies (2019); with Rita Dhamoon, Davina Bhandar, and Satwinder Bains, she is co-editor of Unmooring the Komagata Maru (University of British Columbia Press, 2019); and with Antoinette Burton, she is co-editor of Animalia: An Anti-Imperial Bestiary of Our Times (Duke University Press, 2020). She has served two terms on the editorial board of Law and Society Review, was recently appointed to the editorial board of Law and Social Inquiry, and was elected to the Law and Society Association’s Board of Trustees (2019-2022). In 2015-2016, she received the Killam Prize for Graduate Teaching, a Dean of Arts Faculty Research Award, and was a Wall Scholar at the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies.
The event is organised and chaired by Professor Maks Del Mar (QMUL).
Past Events
Teach-In: ‘Hindutva and the University’
Wednesday 22nd January, 2020
6:00 pm, QMUL Mile End Campus, ArtsTwo 3.20
With Mehroosh Tak (Kashmir Solidarity Movement), Meena Dhanda (Wolverhampton), Akanksha Mehta (Goldsmiths) and Rahul Rao (SOAS), chaired by Akshi Singh (QMUL). This panel will discuss the role played by pedagogy and knowledge production in the Hindu nationalist project, as well as the forms of learning, knowledge, and organising that are seen as threats to it. In doing so, it will place the recent attacks on Indian universities within a longer history of military occupations and everyday violence against minorities in India.
Discussion of ‘Jugaad Time’ by Amit S Rai
Wednesday 9th October, 2019
5:00 pm, Arts Two Senior Common Room (4th Floor), QMUL
All are welcome to the South Asia Forum discussion of our colleague Amit S Rai’s new book, Jugaad Time: Ecologies of Everyday Hacking in India (Duke University Press, 2019). Amit, who is Reader in Creative Industries and Arts Organising at QMUL, will be in conversation with Gerard Hanlon (Professor of Organisational Sociology, QMUL), chaired by Shital Pravinchandra (Lecturer in Comparative Literature, QMUL).
Film Screening: Many Months in Mirya, with Renu Savant
Wednesday 21st November, 2018
2:00 pm, Alfred Hitchcock Theatre, Arts One, QMUL
Many Months in Mirya is an anonymous researcher's diary, in video. Drawing from auto-ethnography, the film records the time of a village over three seasons, in 2015 India. Telling stories of characters and forces in the village, natural and human-made, historical and present, the film draws its power from frugal economy and long duration. The film is the winner of the 2017 John Abraham National Award for Best Documentary, Kerala, India. Join us for this free screening, followed by a discussion with the director Renu Savant.
Geography Postgraduate Research Frameworks: Screening of ‘Cities of Sleep’
Tuesday 13th November, 2018
4:00 pm, G.O. Jones 208, QMUL
Taking us into the heady world of insurgent sleeper communities in India’s capital, Cities of Sleep trails the lives of two individuals. Shakeel, a young man who has spent seven years sleeping rough, is now having to deal with the “sleep mafia”—goons who capitalise on the scarcity of safe sleeping spaces in the absence of government safety nets. The film follows his attempts to secure a safe sleeping space as the infamous winter rains of Delhi are due. We also meet Ranjeet, who runs a ‘sleep-cinema’ community under a huge double-storey iron bridge that straddles the banks of the Yamuna River. The thin strip of land houses shanty cinemas where over 400 homeless come and sleep through the day for a nominal price. The flooding of the river poses a threat to the people sleeping there every monsoon.
Launch Event: Gyan Prakash, ‘Democracy and Emergency in Modern India’
Thursday 1st November, 2018
6:00 pm, Arts Two Lecture Theatre, QMUL
RSVP online at modernindia.eventbrite.co.uk.
On the night of June 25, 1975, Indira Gandhi declared a state of emergency in India, suspending constitutional rights and rounding up her political opponents in midnight raids across the country. In the twenty-one harrowing months that followed, her regime unleashed a brutal campaign of coercion and intimidation, arresting and torturing people by the tens of thousands, razing slums, and imposing compulsory sterilization on the poor. In spite of this searing experience, the Emergency has received little historical study. Stripping away the comfortable myth that this authoritarian turn was a momentary episode brought on entirely by Indira's crisis of power, Professor Gyan Prakash argues that the political crisis was long in the making and was a turning point in the history of India’s democracy. Prakash focuses on the stories of the imprisonment of leaders to illustrate how this moment raised searching questions about the meanings of public and personal freedom.