Call for papers: South Asia Graduate Students Conference, University of Chicago, February 23-24, 2017

The South Asia Graduate Student Conference at the University of Chicago is known for bringing together graduate students working on the Indian Subcontinent across disciplines, time periods and regions of interest from campuses within and outside the United States. The conference offers a unique opportunity for graduate students working on southern Asia to engage with the research of their peers.

Over the last decade, scholarship that traverses disciplinary boundaries has animated the field of South Asian Studies. Building from diverse disciplinary lenses – historical, sociological, anthropological, literary, linguistic and performative – scholars of the Subcontinent have developed unique academic tools suited specifically for the study of this region, potentially reconfiguring disciplinary boundaries in productive ways. This year’s conference, entitled Materials in focus: Working across media and methods in South Asia, invites participants to reflect on how the materials they engage with defines their scholarship.

How can a more rigorous intellectual engagement with materials open up how we conceptualise cultural constructs and emergent political formations? What are affordances and resistance of the materials we engage with to study South Asia? How do we mobilize these beyond their functional purpose as ‘sources’, grappling instead with the very processes of their fabrication, preservation (or destruction) and place in the historical record? The diverse range of materials – archival, epigraphic, archaeological, art historical, performative, ethnographic among others shape our methodological choices and the media in which we make and circulate our work.

Questions of method emerge out of, and determine, the materials we work with. How do we think about method when the object of research is a geographical and cultural area?   How can research situated in the Subcontinent contribute to rethinking traditional research methods innovatively?

The conference invites methodologically self-reflexive papers that foreground questions of materials and materiality in South Asian studies. Possible themes include but are not limited to: material culture, archives and ‘museification’, oral narratives and histories, the making and circulation of art, performance and theatre, film and new media. Presentations may take several forms, including seminar papers, collaborative projects and performances.

Please send a title and abstract (250-300 words) to sagsc2017.uchicago@gmail.com by 5 pm on 20^th December 2016.

Abstracts should include name, e-mail address and institutional affiliation.

Selected participants will be informed by 5^th January 2017.