Panels
Below you find a list of panels.
The deadline for sending your abstract was 1 March 2006. If you wish to participate in the conference, please see the section on registration.
All correspondence with regard to your paper abstract, will be with the panel organizers.
Preliminary overview of all panels (.xls file)
Preliminary overview of all panels (.pdf file)
ACADEMIC PROGRAMME AT THE 19th ECMSAS 2006
Special Events:
P1: Plenary discussion: Briging together European Research on Contemporary India
R1: IIAS/ASiA Roundtable discussion: Border Zones and Illicit Movements in South Asia
Panel Sessions:
Panel 1: Coping Strategies, Alliances and Alienation between and among ‘Have' and ‘Have-not' Youths in South Asia
Young people in South Asia are relatively more excluded from the benefits of the (welfare or developmental) state than similar groups in the North. Yet, higher levels of national economic growth since the last fifteen years have not bypassed all young people in South Asia, and some have indeed benefited and now possess more social, economic and cultural capital than previous generations.
Panel 2: Religious Reform Movements in South Asia from the Nineteenth Century to the Present
The panel aims to bring together specialists from a range of disciplines within the humanities and social sciences to explore the development of South Asian religious reform movements from the nineteenth century to the present.
Panel 3: Rituals and their Dynamics
Generally, there is a tendency in Studies on South Asian rituals to perceive and confine those practices to the domain of the unchangeable and static, with no, or hardly any variability. They are alleged to follow strict rules and norms, and are highly repetitive, involving human agents whose positions are quite easy to identify and whose motivations are transparent and functional.
Panel 4: People in Motion, Ideas in Motion: Culture and Circulation in Pre-modern South Asia
With the mobility of people in pre-modern South Asia, whether involved in trade, political life, military campaigns, following pilgrimage circuits, or seeking new patronage opportunities, came various degrees of exchange and circulation within and between cultural spaces.
Panel 5: Religion in modern literature and film
Papers are invited that discuss the interaction between religion and literature or film in South Asia. The papers are to deal with literary texts (dating from the medieval or modern period) or films that have their origin in the subcontinent and are studied in their original language.
Panel 6: Hagiographies: Topics, Canonization and Interculturality
Oral as well as written hagiographies are texts about eminent personalities and their virtues (Muslim saints, Buddhist Bodhisattvas, Christian martyrs, statesmen, poets, philosophers etc.). As such they tell more about the way people imagine these particular persons than about the actual/historic person behind these projections.
Panel 7: Power of Performance - Performance of Power. Towards an understanding of Performance and Politics
The panel aims to discuss the interrelation of performance and politics in South Asia. The nexus between state and stage performance, ritualised politics and political rituals will be analysed in their local configurations.
Panel 8: Religion, Power and Politics in Pakistan
In its brief history of over half a century, Pakistan has faced much turbulence and instability. While economic growth rates have been at a Third World average, indicators of social development have been lower and vast areas have been excluded from development.
Panel 9: Processions in South Asia and in the Diaspora
Processions have been a significant dimension of religion in South Asia and in the South Asian diaspora for a long time. The last years, however, have seen an increase of processions both in South Asia and in the diaspora. This panel looks at these processions and the reasons for this increase in activity.
Panel 10: Détente in South Asia? Will it Hold?
In the last few years South Asia has witnessed several dramatic developments. One major breakthrough was the 2004 January summit meeting of the SAARC in which it was unanimously decided to implement the long pending proposal to create the South Asia Free Trade Zone.
Panel 12: Globalisation: its impact and ramifications
Much of the economy, the culture, the social movements and the political discourse in South Asia up to the late 1980s could still basically be seen in terms of tradition, albeit with change but definitely with a strong local paradigm, embedded in indigenousness.
Panel 13: ‘Tribes of Mind?' Exploring, Contesting and Redefining Notions of Tribe
Contemporary debates about caste and race criticise the presumed fixed and essentialising makeup of both concepts (e.g. Bayly 1999, Dirks 2001). In Castes of Mind, Dirks argues that current conceptualizations of caste are in important respects a product of the British Raj.
Panel 14: From Improvement to Development: Civilising Missions in Colonial and Post-Colonial South Asia
Until recently the rhetoric and practice of the British imperial ‘civilising mission' in South Asia has not been systematically analysed by historians. Building on our first effort in the field, we want to complete the picture by exploring some aspects of the phenomenon that have largely escaped scholarly attention so far.
Panel 15: Worlding Maps: Culture, Power, History, and Space in the Cartographic History of South Asia
For long the traditional terrain of cartographic history has been formed by studies of modern mapmaking which have examined the activities of surveying agencies, and the technicalities and representational effects of modern maps. Since the 1980s there has been a spate of important writings in the history of cartography, most notably, the ambitious multivolume History of Cartography under the joint editorship of J.B. Harley and David Woodward.
Panel 16: Medicine and Colonial Society in South Asia: 1800-1950
The social history of medicine in colonial South Asia is a rapidly developing field that has gone beyond the initial pioneering all-India surveys of state medicine. This panel seeks to further traditional concerns of social history by exploring the colonial context over the 1800-1950 period.
Panel 17: Political Economy of Decentralisation: Socio Economic Consequences in a Developing Economy
The aim of the panel is to discuss and disseminate the empirical and theoretical findings of the studies of the various socio- economic implications of decentralization, both good and bad in the context of developing countries, particularly in the countries of the South Asian region.
Panel 19: Religion and Politics in South Asia
South Asia represents a broad variety of western political systems as well as presents indigenous religious traditions. Religion appeared as key factor in the partition of British India ; subsequent communal conflicts, sectarian violence perpetrated by different religious communities in the countries of the region could not escape religious influence.
Panel 20: New Directions in Partition Scholarship - CANCELLED!
Panel 21: Sri Lankan politics: conflict, reconstruction and governance
This panel focuses on the political challenges of contemporary Sri Lanka. It welcomes papers dealing with violent conflicts and peace efforts, political culture and governance issues, as well as reconstruction of war and tsunami affected areas.
Panel 22: Bengal studies
The panel is an opportunity for all those with an interest in the culture and society of West Bengal and Bangladesh - and the Bengali diaspora worldwide - to share their recent research.
Panel 23: Translocal Muslim networks and religious mobilisation in South Asia (18th-21st centuries)
During the last centuries, South Asia witnessed the emergence of several Islamic movements. Specially since the 19th century, many new Islamic schools (madaris), printing presses and associations were established to propagate the aims and teachings of these movements.
Panel 24: Comparative issues of Ageing: Public and private care and security arrangements
Shifting inter-generation contracts, emerging institutional tensions and state policy could be key actors in understanding the implications of the process of population ageing for the social security (including pensions, insurance systems etc.), health care, institutional support systems as well as the social relations of aged people.
Panel 25: British Empire: Environmental Change, Disease, Famine and Protest in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century South Asia
From time immemorial the forest dwellers, pastoral nomads, and agriculturists had locally managed the environmental resources of the Indian Subcontinent. Their interaction had in fact defined the history of this region.
Panel 26: Security Imperatives for South Asia in Emerging Political Environment
My panel expected to hilight security imperatives for South Asia in emerging political environment. During the last few years the global strategic environment has undergone major changes, specially after the end of cold war.
Panel 27: Pilgrimage Landscape, Cosmogram and Planning the Heritage Cities
South Asians in the ancient past ordered the natural world on cosmological principles. Mountains and springs, plains and rivers, were sites and channels of sacred power from historical events and timeless sacred forces. And, geographical features were inscribed by human hands to mark their sacredness.
Panel 28: Ethnicity and development: tribes and small peoples of India
The thrust How do and did members of smaller peoples (tribals, minority groups) use their ethnicity to strengthen their position in different political and economic contexts. Are these positions development -oriented or do they run counter to modern development?
Panel 29: International Relations in South Asia
International relations cover a broad range of topics that encompass foreign policy studies, bi- and multilateral relations, international regimes, prospects and problems of regional co-operation and so on.
Panel 30: Local Democracy in South Asia
The proposed workshop will attempt to refine the conceptual agendas and tools that have been used to understand democratisation in South Asia so far, as well as to identify knowledge gaps. One of the core features of democracy is its versatility in changing a government and transferring power in a peaceful way.
Panel 31: Linguistics of lesser-known languages in South Asia
South Asia's major national and regional languages have received a tremendous boost from the increasing availability of electronic media, which also makes it cheaper and faster to publish printed books and periodicals.
Panel 32: Post Green Revolution Agrarian Transformation in South Asia: Ecology and Peasant Life under Globalization
The Green Revolution ushered a dynamic development of South Asian agriculture in terms of increased yields and income accruing to the rural population. The food problem was solved to an extent that there was enough food to distribute among those who could afford to buy it.
Panel 33: Natural Disasters, their Impact on Marginalised and Disadvantaged Groups and Demographic Consequences
Natural disasters, such as avalanche, landslide, earthquake, famine, tsunami, flood, cloudburst, cyclone and tornado cause immense suffering in South Asia including loss of lives, livelihood, home and habitat. The tsunami of 26th December 2004 was one such disaster, the devastating earthquake in Kashmir of 8th October 2005 was the second one in less than a year.
Panel 34: Gender and Islam in Modern South Asia
The interaction between Gender and Islam has emerged as a much discussed and disputed arena both within South Asia as well as among diasporic South Asian groups in recent decades.
Panel 35: Social Movements and Social Movement Networks: Symbolic Acts or Transformative Processes?
The proliferation of social movement networks in a context of globalisation has been heralded as forging a new global counter-hegemonic public sphere within civil society.
Panel 36: The World of Asian Commerce: Temporal and Spatial Continuities
This panel addresses the survival strategies of early-modern Asian merchant communities and networks across time and space. Contributors are stimulated to take a longer-term and interregional perspective, preferably with a special eye for the comparative and the connective.
Panel 38: ‘Syncretism,' Christianity, and India's Religious Traditions: Squaring Texts, Practices, and Rituals with Terms, Concepts, and Cases
Recognizing 1) that Indian Christianity ‘metabolizes' pre-existing elements from India's various religious traditions to articulate a distinctively non-Western identity; 2) that ‘syncretism' is a complex term often used normatively to stigmatize Indian Christianity as ‘inauthentic'; and 3) that the Indian-ness of Indian Christianity has been - and continues to be - articulated, from the ‘top-down' and the ‘bottom-up,' through indigenous texts, practices, and rituals, the panel invites interdisciplinary reflection, based on either textual sources or ethnographic data, on the analytical usefulness of concepts associated with the term ‘syncretism' and related vocabulary (transculturation, etc.).
Panel 39: Nationalisms and their Impact in South Asia
In the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries South Asia underwent a far-reaching political, social and cultural metamorphosis as a consequence of the impact of modern nationalism.
Panel 40: Everyday Life and the secular in South Asia
This panel is concerned with questions about everyday lives in South Asia, and the ways in which questions framed by elites about religion and secularism, often play out quite differently at the local level.
Panel 41: Political Development, Processes of Democratization and Human Rights in South Asia
The aim of the panel is to present and discuss empirical findings and conceptual propositions of the studies of polity in South Asia with a special reference to processes of democratization, its progress as well as obstacles and set-backs.
Panel 42: Metamorphosis of the South Asian Cities and Villages
With rapid urbanization, economic growth, rural development and globalization there is marked structural changes in cities and villages in South Asia. Some cities have become big and there are demographic, physical, economic, technological and environmental imbalances within such megacities.
Panel 43: Beyond comparisons - in search of a language to write history across cultures
Scholarship on modern South Asia today has just about begun to respond to many of the challenges of a changing world. While a handful of analyses have directed their attention from area studies to comparisons, and to the examination of global processes, this shift has yet to be systematically pursued and accomplished.
Panel 44: Overturning North-Indian Hegemonies Then and Now: Views from the Deccan
Today the Deccan remains understudied in comparison to the North, which has repercussions for our perception of many things Indian. The very act of studying things Deccani puts into question notions derived from the North-Indian context that are hegemonic in modern scholarly and non-scholarly writings, such as ideas about what Urdu is, ideas about literary genres, ideas about Sufism and Bhakti etc.
Panel 46: Fulfilling Millennium Development Goals: Institutional Responses in South Asia
The eight Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) - which range from halving extreme poverty to halting the spread of HIV/AIDS and providing universal primary education, all by the target date of 2015 - form a blueprint agreed to by all the world's countries and all the world's leading development institutions. The Panel focuses on the role that MDGs have started to play in the development priorities, discourse and practice in South Asian countries.
Panel 47: The Political Economy of Bangladesh The panel will bring together young as well as established scholars with an active research interest in political and economic developments in Bangladesh and their implications for its relations within South Asia and globally.
Panel 48: The Hindutva of Development: Capitalist Development and Resistance in Gujarat The political stabilization of Hindutva in Gujarat has attracted much attention in recent years. However, the socio-economic background against which it is taking place - that of one of the most successful capitalist development among the states of India - has received less attention.
Panel 49: Urban Governance in India's Large Cities
This panel brings together papers that discuss and analyse changing modes of urban governance in India's large cities. Economic liberalisation and political decentralisation are, obviously, two major forces contributing to current changes in the way India's metropolitan areas are being managed and governed. Widespread social and civil society movements show complementary trends and influence socio-political discussions as well.