Dear South Asia Students, Staff, Faculty, and Community Members, Welcome back to another academic year! We have several new students and faculty joining us this year, and I extend a particularly warm welcome to them. We look forward to the many ways in which you will enrich our intellectual and social community. I would also

Throughout time the degrees and forms of human rights violations have changed but art and culture have always been used as significant tools to demonstrate the resistance to such violations all over the world. The course “Human Rights and Resistance: A Case of South Asia” (BIS 466), offered at UW-Bothell in autumn 2022, examines the

On February 3rd 2022, Professor Mythri Jegathesan delivered a lecture on her research on debt and its embedment in the everyday relations of caste, work and gender on Sri Lanka’s tea plantations; often, moneylending, marriage and divisions of labour make up everyday relations across households and generations in these plantations, with a workforce of a

On November 18th, 2021, Professor Bishnupriya Ghosh delivered a lecture on research from her upcoming book manuscript, The Virus Touch: Theorizing Epidemic Media (under contract with Duke University Press). Ghosh’s text considers how “epidemic intensities,” as a research concept enables scaling between the universal and the particular, and therein attunes us to both scientific findings and the

In collaboration with EarthLab & the Jackson School’s South Asia Center, Future Rivers hosted a panel discussion about the film Into Dust, a film on the Pakistani water crisis, and one woman’s fight for justice for the city’s most vulnerable residents. The panel featured UW professors Dr. S. Charusheela, Dr. Faisal Hossain and Dr. Sunila S. Kale

On October 14th 2021, Waqas Butt joined the UW South Asia Center and presented an excerpt from his upcoming book project “Reproducing Lahore: Waste and the Work of Infrastructures in Urban Pakistan.” This project examines the ways in which waste workers, who are drawn predominantly from low or non-caste (Dalit) groups, have become essential components

On Thursday, February 18, geographer Jane Dyson (Associate Professor, University of Melbourne) shared her short ethnographic film Spirit: Longing and Belonging in the Indian Himalayas, which drew on her long-standing fieldwork in a Himalayan village. After a short introduction from Dr. Dyson, participants viewed the film independently and reconvened for a thought-provoking Q&A session about rural-urban divides,

On January 21, 2021, Natalia di Pietrantonio (Assistant Curator of South Asian Art at the Seattle Art Museum) delivered a talk on book arts during the time of Wajid Ali Shah. Her reading of the Ishqnama highlighted workings of power and sovereign control woven through the erotic images and narratives contained in the famous tome.

On February 4, 2021, historian Abhishek Kaicker (UC Berkeley) joined the UW South Asia Center for a virtual lecture on sovereignty and popular politics in Mughal Delhi. Kaicker’s incisive wit and thought-provoking analysis encouraged the audience to rethink conceptions of sovereignty in pre-colonial India, where citizens of the Mughal empire were not simply passive subjects but

On December 10, 2020, Koonal Duggal (Research Fellow, Social Anthropology, University of Edinburgh) shared his latest research with UW faculty and graduate students during a virtual manuscript workshop. Examining the 2007 Dera Sacha Sauda controversy, Duggal drew on a wide audio-visual archive to explore questions of Sikh identity, religion, and caste in modern representations of gurus.