Ireland India Institute hosts its third annual conference with the recent attacks in Sri Lanka and the Indian elections key points of discussion
The Ireland India Institute at Dublin City University is holding its Third Conference on South Asia on DCU’s All Hallows Campus. The conference begins at 2pm today (Wednesday, 24 April) and runs through until Friday 26th. An interdisciplinary conference, it brings together over 100 academics, the majority from South Asian Universities, to discuss key issues for contemporary South Asia – including the recent events in Sri Lanka, the Indian Elections, and the changing nature of gender identity.
The keynote speakers are Professor Charu Gupta from University of Delhi, Professor Subrata K Mitra, University of Heidelberg and Professor Jonathan Spencer, from Edinburgh University.
Professor Gupta will talk on Romance and Religion: Illicit Intimacies in Modern India, based on her work on gender and sexuality in India.
Professor Spencer will discuss the contentious boundary between the religious and the political in Sri Lanka and reflect on the Easter Sunday bombings in the Sri Lankan capital, Colombo.
Professor Mitra will speak about the current India Elections in his lecture on Political Science in an Age of Uncertainty: The 'Rational' Voter in Indian Elections
About the keynote speakers
Professor Gupta is an Associate Professor at the University of Delhi, India. She has been widely admired for her work on gender and sexuality in nineteenth-century India and has been visiting faculty at Yale University, University of Washington and SOAS, University of London among others. Her book The Gender of Caste: Representing Dalits in Print, published by the University of Washington Press was widely acclaimed.
Professor Spencer is the Regius Professor of South Asian Language, Culture and Society at the University of Edinburgh. He has carried out fieldwork in Sri Lanka since the early 1980s, concentrating at first on rural change and local politics, but writing more recently on ethnic conflict, political violence and political non-violence. His current research looks at the fraught boundary between the religious and the political in Sri Lanka and elsewhere, the history of dissent in Sri Lanka, and the consequences of forced dislocation for poor communities in cities in Sri Lanka and Pakistan.
Professor Mitra is Head of the Department of Political Science and Board Member and former Director of the South Asia Institute at the University of Heidelberg, Germany. His books include Citizenship and the Flow of Ideas: Structure, Agency and Power, Reuse: The Art and Politics of Integration and Anxiety, Politics in India: Structure, Process, Policy and When Rebels become Stakeholders.
The conference has 22 panels covering a wide range of contemporary issues for South Asia.
The themes for the conference include:
Contemporary Nationalisms in South Asia
Electoral Transformations in South Asia: Forging New Hegemonies?
Framing identities in South Asia
The Politics of Environmental policies
Interpreting the past, predicting the future: Literature and film in South Asia
Interrogating Colonial Relationships
The politics of cyberspace
The full programme for the three days of the conference is available here.