May 15-16, 2009
University of Washington

 Downloadable PDF

Purnima Dhavan
(History)

Rowan Ellis
(Geography and South Asia Studies)

Sunila Kale
(Jackson School of International Studies)

Vikram Prakash
(Architecture)

Priti Ramamurty
(Women Studies and South Asia Studies)

Juned Shaikh
(History and South Asia Studies)

Keith Snodgrass
(South Asia Studies)

Anand Yang
(History and Jackson School of International Studies)

 metro09@u.washington.edu

Simpson Center for the Humanities

The Jackson School of International Studies, South Asia Center

Front Row: Sapana Doshi, Zarin Ahmad, Priti Ramamurthy, Karen Coelho
Second Row: Leela Fernandes, K. Sivaramakrishnan, Amita Baviskar, Neha Sami, Mona Bhan
Third Row: Sunila Kale, Rowan Ellis, Arif Hasan, Anand Yang, Jan Breman
Back Row: Asher Ghertner, Vikram Prakash, Curt Gambetta

Schedule (pdf)
Abstracts & Speaker Bios (pdf)

Jan Breman is Professor of Sociology at the University of Amsterdam and director of the Centre for Asian Studies, Amsterdam. He has conducted anthropological fieldwork in India since the early 1960s, focusing on rural and urban labor relations and especially the informal sector. His recent publications include Wage Hunters and Gatherers in the Landscape of Labour in India (1994), Footloose Labour: Working in India's Informal Economy (1996), Expulsion of Labour from the Formal Sector (2003), and From Working Class Neighborhood to Slum Localities (2004).

Arif Hasan, an architect and planner, is Founding Chairman of the Urban Resource Centre in Karachi. He studied architecture at the Oxford Polytechnic in England and established a successful architectural practice in Karachi in 1968. The nature of the practice changed as a result of his involvement against evictions and his providing support to hawkers and fishing communities between 1973 to 1975. His work with the Orangi Pilot Project and the Urban Resource Centre took the lessons learnt further. His publications include Squatter Settlements in Karachi (1991) and Pragmatism and the Built Environment (1998), in addition to various articles and monographs.

Leela Fernandes is Professor of Political Science at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, with a joint appointment in Women’s Studies. Her primary interests include culture and politics, theories of political economy, labor studies, the politics of globalization, South Asian studies, feminist theory, and comparative women's movements. She is the author of Producing Workers: The Politics of Gender, Class and Culture in the Calcutta Jute Mills (1997), Transforming Feminist Practice (2003), and India’s New Middle Class: Democratic Politics in an Era of Economic Reform (2006), which examines the political implications of the rise of the Indian middle class upon Indian democracy and the politics of globalization. She has received fellowships from the MacArthur Foundation, the American Institute for Indian Studies, the Center for Critical Analysis of Contemporary Culture, Rutgers University, and the American Council for Learned Societies.

Kalyanakrishnan (Shivi) Sivaramakrishnan is Professor of Anthropology; Professor of Forestry & Environmental Studies; Co-Director of the Program in Agrarian Studies; and Chair of the South Asian Studies Council in the MacMillan Center for International & Area Studies. He is co-coordinator of the PhD Program in Anthropology and Forestry & Environmental Studies. Sivaramakrishnan's research interests span environmental history, political anthropology, cultural geography, development studies, and science studies. He is the author of Modern Forests: Statemaking and Environmental Change in Colonial Eastern India (1999 & 2002) and the co-editor of Agrarian Environments: Resources, Representations, and Rule in India (2000), Regional Modernities: The Cultural Politics of Development in India (2003), and Ecological Nationalisms: Nature, Livelihoods, and Identities in South Asia (2006). His current projects include the interdisciplinary study of the Indian state and new research on law, civil society, and environmental sustainability in India.

Karen Coelho is Assistant Professor at the Madras Institute of Development Studies, Chennai, India, focusing on urban governance and reforms. She earned her doctorate in sociocultural anthropology (2004) from the University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, U.S.A. Her dissertation is titled Of Engineers, Rationalities and Rule: An Ethnography of Neoliberal Reform in An Urban Water Utility in South India. She holds an M.Phil in Development Studies (1993) from the Institute of Development Studies (IDS), University of Sussex, Brighton, U.K. Her areas of focus were the political economy of structural adjustment, public administration, and institutional change in India. Her research interests include anthropology of the state, neo-liberalism, urban governance, international development, and gender.

Amita Baviskar is Associate Professor at the Institute of Economic Growth, Delhi. Her research focuses on the cultural politics of environment and development. Her first book, In the Belly of the River: Tribal Conflicts over Development in the Narmada Valley (2005), discussed the struggle for survival by adivasis in central India against a large dam. Her subsequent work explores the themes of resource rights, subaltern resistance, and cultural identity. She has edited Waterlines: The Penguin Book of River Writings (2003), Waterscapes: The Cultural Politics of a Natural Resource (2007), and Contested Grounds: Essays on Nature, Culture and Power (2008). She is currently writing about bourgeois environmentalism and spatial restructuring in the context of economic liberalization in Delhi. She has taught at the University of Delhi and has been a visiting professor at Stanford, Cornell, and the University of California, Berkeley. She is co-editor of the journal Contributions to Indian Sociology and was awarded the 2005 Malcolm Adiseshiah Award for distinguished contributions to development studies.

Manit Rastogi is an architect and Managing Director of Morphogenesis, an association of architects, designers, urbanists, and environmentalists of which he was a founding member in 1996. He holdsan AA Diploma, for which he was awarded Honours, and the Graduate Diploma in Sustainable Energy Design, for which he was awarded distinction at the Architectural Association. He has taught at the Architectural Association, London; School of Planning and Architecture, Delhi; and the Hong Kong Polytechnic Institute; and has also served as a juror on several design and award juries. He is also a member of the Technical Advisory Committee to the Ministry of New and Renewable Energy, Government of India.

 

Contemporary South Asian cities are rife with contradictions. Slums and skyscrapers, nativist and cosmopolitan social imaginaries, manufacturing industries and financial institutions, sweatshops and hi-tech companies, often exist side by side. This conference asks, what are the micro-political processes that attempt to mediate, navigate, and/or challenge these contradictions. Presentations will complicate perspectives that theorize urbanization in developing countries as the predetermined outcomes of macroprocesses. Adherents of these perspectives view urbanization in the region through categories such as modernization, globalization, and capitalism. By focusing on micropolitics, this conference will complicate such meta-categories and offer new analytics for the study of South Asian cities.

UW campus map
Transportation information (pdf)
Local restaurants (pdf)
Local hotels (pdf)

We have arranged a group room block rate with University Inn for $115/night single occupancy (plus local taxes and fees, currently 15.6%).When you reserve your space, please reference the following guest room block title: Metropolis and Micropolitics.

University Inn
4140 Roosevelt Way NE
Seattle WA 98105
206.632.5055

Seattle visitors' guide (pdf)