13th Humanities & Social Sciences Conference: Critical Interventions: Mapping

Emerging Scholarship on South Asia

Wednesday, April 10, 2019 - 9:00am to Thursday, April 11, 2019 - 5:00pm
LUMS

Mushtaq Ahmad Gurmani School of Humanities and Social Sciences presents

13th Humanities & Social Sciences Conference: Critical Interventions: Mapping Emerging
Scholarship on South Asia
Date: April 10 - 11, 2019
Venue: LUMS
Deadline for submission of proposals: November 15, 2018 at hssconf2019@lums.edu.pk.

About the Conference

This conference offers an intervention in the understandings of South Asia as reality and
construct. By bringing together work across multiple disciplines from both indigenous and
diasporic scholars working on the region, we hope to build upon the movement to decolonise the
academy. This decolonial turn is critical because the academy functions as “a site of production
and re-production of discourses that preserve certain colonial structures and maintain Euro-
American hegemonies in the larger material world” (Davies and Peterson 2003). At the same
time, that which exists outside the hegemonic perspective is rendered “invisible, is excluded
from the real and is actively disdained, even unnamed” (Vazquez 2011), thereby highlighting the
need for epistemic disruption that foregrounds and legitimizes emerging perspectives on South
Asia.

By showcasing emerging scholarship on the region, this conference will work to challenge,
resituate, and rename existing categories that essentialize South Asia given that “category
creation itself is an act of power” (Cornwall and Lindisfame 2011). The conference will also
enable scholars to generate newer critical paradigms to think through the “more complex and
controversial…transformations of contemporary South Asia” (Bose 2003). In doing so, the
conference will aim to dismantle reductive conceptions about South Asia, generate
multidisciplinary knowledge(s) about the region, and enable academics to form transnational
epistemic networks.

To this end, we invite paper and panel proposals based on research on India, Pakistan,
Bangladesh, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bhutan, Maldives and the South Asian Diaspora.
Papers and panels may engage with the following themes, but need not be limited to them:
- War, conflict and regional (in)stability
- Arts, literature, film and cultural construction
- History, coloniality and hierarchy
- City, neoliberal modernity and citizenship
- Challenging dominant governance paradigms
- Ethnicity, class and social stratification
- Continuity and contestations of gender
- Environment, natural resource management and precarity
- Religion, secularity and ideology
- States and revolutions
- Education, autonomy and reform
- Narratives of nationhood and subject formation
- Indigenous resistance and strategies of survival

We welcome both individual paper and panel submissions. Individual paper submissions must
include a 300 word abstract, paper title, and a two-page resume.

Panel proposal submissions must include a 300 word panel abstract. In addition, please provide
paper titles, abstracts (300 words), names, affiliations, and contact information for each
participant of the panel.

There will be limited funding available for accommodation and travel expenses, so we encourage
participants to seek funding from their home institutions. If you have any questions, please write
to us at hssconf2019@lums.edu.pk