[Buddha-l] CFP: Annual S. Asia Conf, Madison, Deadline April 1, 2008

[jkirk]

This particular CFP topic seems a must for those on the list who have been
concerned with the Maitreya Project slated now for Kushinagar in India.
I just found this today...so time is short for abstracts to the panel in
question: Mar 30.
Joanna K.
===========================================================

H-ASIA
March 25, 2008

CFP: Annual S. Asia Conf, Madison, Deadline April 1, 2008
Call for abstracts for the upcoming Annual  Conference on South Asia in the
University of Wisconsin, Madison, Oct  16-19, 2008.

Dear  colleagues,

This is a call for abstracts for a panel entitled "Fragile Spaces, Contested
Places: Politics of land-use in South Asia" for the upcoming Annual
Conference on South Asia in Madison. The deadline for the submission of the
abstracts in April 1st, 2008. We would  appreciate it if you could send us
your abstract by the 30th of March. Here's  a brief description of the
panel.

This panel explores  the shifting sensibilities around land and land-use
within the context of  neoliberal economic policies and military
interventions in South-Asia.  While conventional understandings of land
emphasized financial stability, food security, social status, and class
positions, local, national,  and global conceptualizations vis-à-vis land
are being revised as new  livelihood practices emerge within economic
structures forged through  neoliberalism and militarization. For local
communities and state-institutions, such revisions entail a redefinition of
cultural meanings as well as political economy of land use. Within this
context, our panel explores the following set of questions: how do local
symbolics and  politics of land-use correspond to and conflict with state
agendas that  privilege militarist and economically-driven claims of
appropriate and just land use; and, how do the polyvalent discourses of
economic modernity and state security play out in conjunction with people’s
desires, aspirations, and subjectivities that are deeply emmeshed in
particular configurations and practices of land-use?

Individual papers in this panel will provide theoretical and ethnographic
perspectives to delineate the vexed and emergent structures of feeling
around appropriation, use, and the centrality of land in people's
consciousness and praxis in contemporary South Asia. The papers initiate an
innovative dialogue to bring together several bodies of literature by
exploring the intricate connections between state and local uses of  space
and place and seemingly disparate ideologies and practices of defense and
development –ideologies and practices that are crucially dependent on the
use and appropriation of land as well as the reconfiguration of community
spaces.

You can send your abstracts to Mona Bhan  at monabhan at depauw.edu or to
Debarati Sen  at dsen at eden.rutgers.edu.


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