India’s controversial Citizenship Amendment Act of December 2019, which offers amnesty to non-Muslim religious minorities from Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan, was announced by the federal government ostensibly to protect religious minorities fleeing persecution from these three Muslim-majority countries. This law highlights a political climate where forms of nationalism are terrifyingly resurging and state borders are being redefined and contested the world over.
To this end, the White Rose South Asia Network presents their Fourth Annual Conference on the theme of ‘Space, Place and Temporalities’. This one-day event will bring together postgraduate students from across the arts, humanities and social sciences to consider various aspects of South Asian society.
Space is constitutive of social relations, political action and cultural identity (Massey 1994). How do South Asianists from different disciplines illustrate the complex negotiation and fluidity between different kinds of spaces in South Asia: whether public-private, rural-urban, sacred-secular, provincial-cosmopolitan, or local-global? Spatiality and practices of placeness have been central to a diversity of humanities and social science research on South Asia: whether histories of labour and labouring contexts, studies of the ecology and environment, women’s practices of place-making (Grodzins Gold, 2014), or in ethnomusicology and performance studies. From the perspective of language, culture, and religion, space and place are also intimately connected to issues of identity and mobility, as well as with practices of memorialisation and commemoration.