Event Title: Smitha Radhakrishnan — Hidden Precarities: Indebtedness, Caste, and Breadwinning in Urban Uttarakhand, India

Date & Time: Friday, February 28, 2025, 2:00 PM - 4:00 PM EST
Location: Joukowsky Forum, 111 Thayer St
Details: Smitha Radhakrishnan explores the intersections of debt, caste, gender, and class in urban Uttarakhand, India, analyzing how financial inclusion policies intersect with informal debt systems. The talk examines patterns of breadwinning and their implications for inequality and economic security. The event includes a Q&A session and reception.

About the Speaker: Smitha Radhakrishnan is the Marion Butler McLean Professor at Wellesley College and a leading scholar in feminist and development studies. She is the author of Making Women Pay and The Gender Order of Neoliberalism.

Sharika Thiranagama: Everyday Life, Fear, and Politics in Northern Sri Lanka

Date: Friday, December 6, 2024
Time: 2:00 PM - 4:00 PM EST
Location: Joukowsky Forum, 111 Thayer St

Join Sharika Thiranagama as she examines the intersection of political mobilization, domestic life, and inequality in South Asia. Her research spans civil war, displacement, and postwar life in Sri Lanka, as well as caste, gender, and labor in Kerala, India. This seminar explores her insights into how historical and social structures shape everyday lives in these regions.

South Asia Seminar Series

Kunal Purohit: H-Pop: The Secretive World of Hindutva Pop Stars

Date: Thursday, December 5, 2024
Time: 4:00 PM - 6:00 PM EST
Location: Leung Conference Room, 280 Brook Street

Award-winning journalist Kunal Purohit delves into the rise of “Hindutva Pop” (H-Pop), a brand of popular culture spreading Hindutva ideology through music, poetry, and social media. In this talk, Purohit explores how H-Pop normalizes Islamophobia, promotes divisiveness, and shapes societal attitudes across India. He profiles the creators, their motivations, and the impact on India’s political landscape.

South Asia Seminar Series

Rebecca M. Brown explores the vibrant, symbolic art of K.C.S. Paniker, a modernist painter from 1960s and 70s Madras whose works brim with life—parakeets, trees, symbols, and emblems of human inquiry coexist on the canvas. Moving beyond mere landscapes, Paniker’s paintings create an “ecology of painted gardens,” weaving animal, vegetal, and symbolic forms with astrological diagrams, equations, and text-like scrawls. Brown’s analysis situates Paniker within South Asian modernism, where human, animal, and natural worlds intermingle, crafting a unique vision of interdependence and cultural narrative.

Sidra Kamran — The In-Between Workers: Femininity and Class Flux in Pakistan’s Service Economy

Date: Friday, November 1, 2024
Time: 2:00 PM - 4:00 PM EST
Location: Joukowsky Forum, 111 Thayer St

Sidra Kamran, Assistant Professor of Sociology at Lewis & Clark College, will discuss the evolving roles of women in Pakistan’s growing service economy, focusing on beauty salon and retail workers. Drawing from her ethnographic research in Meena Bazaar, a women-only marketplace, and Delight, a mixed-gender budget department store, Kamran explores how these workers navigate complex class and moral identities. She argues that these women are “in-between” economically and socially, defying simple class categorization and negotiating their place in Pakistan’s conservative public sphere.

Kamran’s work sheds light on the intersection of gender, labor, and class in South Asia, and her research contributes to understanding how women are reshaping urban spaces in a country with low female labor force participation. This talk is part of the South Asia Seminar series.