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Wed, Sep 18, 2019 at 05:00pm
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Wed, Sep 18, 2019 at 07:00pm
Film Director Musa Syeed will join Professor Ali Asani for a screening of his film, Valley of Saints, followed by a question-and-answer session.
About the Film:
Dal Lake is a sprawling aquatic community in Kashmir where erupting political violence often distracts from the natural beauty. Gulzar, a young, working-class boatman, plans to skip town with his best friend in search of a better life, but a weeklong military curfew derails their departure. Forced to wait it out, Gulzar takes a job assisting a scientist named Asifa. As they navigate the floating landscape, an unlikely relationship blossoms between the two. When Asifa’s research reveals that the lake and an entire way of life face an alarming threat, everything in Gulzar’s own life begins to take on a new hue. Intricately weaving contemporary issues with traditional culture and ancient myths, VALLEY OF SAINTS is a vibrant, lyrical film about finding one’s path home in a changing world.
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Tue, Sep 24, 2019 at 06:00pm
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Tue, Sep 24, 2019 at 07:30pm
In India, subaltern groups must resort to the universalizing vocabulary of citizenship in order to stake claims for redistribution and recognition. But on what basis do they do this — especially under severe coercion? Alf Nilsen, Professor of Sociology at the University of Pretoria, will explore this question by investigating movement patterns in the Bhil heartland of western India, where Adivasi communities have organized and mobilized against the tyranny of the local state.
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Wed, Jun 5, 2019 at 06:30pm
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Wed, Jun 5, 2019 at 08:00pm
In this talk, Roluahpuia, the Mittal Institute’s 2018-19 Raghunathan Family Fellow, will explore how and why politics among the Mizos continue to remain nationalistic in India and how to understand this phenomenon in contemporary India. This discussion will be moderated by Virginius Xaxa, Visiting Professor at the Institute for Human Development.
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Wed, Apr 24, 2019 at 06:00pm
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Wed, Apr 24, 2019 at 07:30pm
COST Free
Engaging with India: Engaging with Feminism and the Passion of “The Before Midnight’s Children”
Speaker: Devaki Jain, Economist, Writer, and Recipient of the Padma Bhushan Award
The Harish C. Mahindra Lecture Series is given in honor of the late Harish C. Mahindra, a distinguished alumnus of Harvard College and a visionary leader of business and industry in India. The lecture is an important component in continuing the education and understanding of the challenges facing South Asia, and provides an ideal forum for the next generation of global leadership.
This year, Devaki Jain will be giving the Mahindra Lecture. Devaki Jain is an Indian economist and writer who has made significant contributions to feminist economics, social justice, and women’s empowerment in India. In 2006, she was awarded the Padma Bhushan — the third-highest civilian honor from the Government of India — for her contributions to society. In this lecture, she will weave her own personal story into the political story of India and discuss her engagement with public life, activism, and her current work in feminist economics.
A reception will follow the lecture. This event is free and open to the public.
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Wed, Apr 17, 2019 at 05:30pm
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Wed, Apr 17, 2019 at 07:00pm
Dr. Shenila Khoja-Moolji is Assistant Professor of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies at Bowdoin College. Her work examines the interplay of gender, race, religion, and power in transnational contexts, particularly in relation to Muslim populations.
Dr. Khoja-Moolji is the author of Forging the Ideal Educated Girl: The Production of Desirable Subjects in Muslim South Asia. She combines historical and cultural analyses with ethnography to examine the meaning of the “educated girl” figure in colonial India and postcolonial Pakistan. Through her work, she has deepened the scholarship on the evolving politics of educational reform and development campaigns. Dr. Khoja-Moolji argues that advocacy for women’s and girl’s education is not simply about access, but more concerned with producing ideal Muslim women and girls with specific relationships to patriarchy, paid work, Islam, and the nation-state. As such, the discourse on girl’s and women’s education also encompasses issues in class relations, religion, and the nation.
Chair: Ali Asani, Professor of Indo-Muslim and Islamic Religion and Cultures, Harvard University
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Fri, Apr 19, 2019 at 07:00pm
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Fri, Apr 19, 2019 at 09:00pm
COST $12
Amar Kanwar (b. 1964) is a New Delhi-based filmmaker and artist whose work has powerfully mined the potential of a slower, drifting method of moving image to forge a politically charged and engaged mode of gently expanded cinema. Kanwar’s critically acclaimed yet fiercely debated Such a Morning hovers on the border between magical realist allegory and slow cinema trance film with an almost Calvino-like fable of a renowned mathematician impulsively abandoning his university post, without explanation, to hibernate in a train car abandoned deep in a lush forest.
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Tue, Apr 2, 2019 at 06:15pm
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Tue, Apr 2, 2019 at 07:30pm
In this event, Professor Ashu Varshney, Ronak Desai, and Hasit Shah will discuss the pressure points of the upcoming Indian election.
Speakers:
Ashu Varshney, Director of the Center for Contemporary South Asia and Sol Goldman Professor of Political Science and International and Public Affairs at Brown University
Ronak Desai, Vice Chair of the Indian Practice at Steptoe and Law & Security Fellow at New America
Hasit Shah, Journalist and Expert on Digital Media and Internet Access in India
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Tue, Mar 26, 2019 at 06:00pm
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Tue, Mar 26, 2019 at 07:30pm
Sripad Motiram, Associate Professor of Economics and Affiliated Faculty, Asian Studies Department, University of Massachusetts Boston
Vamsi Vakulabharanam, Co-Director, Asian Political Economy Program (Political Economy Research Institute) and Associate Professor of Economics, University of Massachusetts Amherst
Sripad Motiram and Vamsi Vakulabharanam will discuss how space is structured in two Indian cities, Hyderabad and Mumbai, along the axes of class and caste. By grouping individuals into classes, castes, and spatial units, they will show that these factors are all independently important in making sense of inequality. Together, they document high (relative to US cities) spatial co-existence — which they call “Grayness” — of groups, and will demonstrate its positive role in achieving development outcomes, arguing that the neoliberal restructuring of cities is eroding it.
