Events

Jointly organized by Asia Research Institute, and Department of Sociology and Anthropology, National University of Singapore.

CHAIRPERSON

Asst Prof Sneha Annavarapu, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, National University of Singapore, and Yale-NUS College

PROGRAM

ABSTRACT

A Thousand Tiny Cuts chronicles the slow transformation of a connected region into national borderlands. Drawing on a decade of fieldwork in northern Bangladesh and eastern India, Sahana Ghosh shows the foundational place of gender and sexuality in the making and management of threat in relation to mobility. Rather than focusing solely on border fences and border crossings, she demonstrates that bordering reorders relations of value. The cost of militarization across this ostensibly “friendly” border is devaluation—of agrarian land and crops, of borderland youth undesirable as brides and grooms in their respective national hinterlands, of regional infrastructures now disconnected, and of social and physical geographies disordered by surveillance. Through a textured ethnography of the gendered political economy of mobility across postcolonial borderlands in South Asia, this ambitious book challenges anthropological understandings of the violence of bordering, migration and citizenship, and transnational inequalities that are based on Euro-American borders and security regimes.

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

Sahana Ghosh is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at National University of Singapore. Her research focuses on borders and borderlands, mobility, citizenship, security and militarization, agrarian change, spatial history, and the political economy of gendered labor. Her first book is A Thousand Tiny Cuts: Mobility and Security Across the India-Bangladesh Borderlands (University of California Press, 2023). Her academic writing and photo essays have been published in American Anthropologist, Current Anthropology, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, Economic and Political Weekly, Gender, Place and Culture, among others. She also contributes podcasts, op-eds, and photo essays to engage in wider public debates on these topics.

Radhika Mongia is Associate Professor of Sociology at York University, Toronto, where she has also served as Director of the Graduate Program in Sociology and as Associate Director of the York Center for Asian Research. Mongia’s research is situated at the intersection of history, law, and political theory and examines issues of migration, citizenship, and state formation. She is the author of Indian Migration and Empire: A Colonial Genealogy of the Modern State (Duke University Press, 2018 and Permanent Black Press [India], 2019). In addition, her work has appeared in various edited volumes and in journals such as Public Culture, Comparative Studies in Society and History, Gender and History, and Cultural Studies, among others. Her current research, titled “Citizenship Deprivation: Legality, Bureaucracy, and the Everyday”, explores how recent practices of identification and new citizenship legislation in India are related to broader transformations in migration regulation, citizenship regimes, and statelessness.

Jasnea Sarma is a senior researcher and lecturer in Political Geography at the University of Zurich. Her research is on the connective geographies and borderworlds between India, China, Myanmar (Burma), and Bangladesh where she has conducted multi sited and multi lingual fieldwork since 2014. Her research work, especially on themes of infrastructures, surveillance, militarisation, resource extraction and border-urban frontiers, has been published in major international journals including International Journal for Urban and Regional Research (IJURR), Eurasian Geography and Economics, Territory Politics and Governance, Political Geography, Journal of Borderland Studies etc. Her ongoing book project draws from her doctoral research, a multi-year ethnography of Myanmar’s borderlands and resource frontiers with India and China, which won the Wang Gungwu Award for an outstanding PhD dissertation in the Humanities and Social Sciences at the National University of Singapore in 2021. Jasnea currently serves as the review and forum editor of Geopolitics and is an editor with the Burma Studies blog, The Tea Circle.

Sidharthan Maunaguru is Associate Professor at Department of Sociology and Anthropology, and South Asian Studies Programme at National University of Singapore. His research focuses on anthropology of war, violence, migration, politics, religion, sovereignty, conscience, ethics and future/s. He was a Newton International Fellow awarded by the Royal Society and British Academy and was a senior fellow at Collegium Helveticum, ETH. He has published in number of peer-reviewed journals including Current Anthropology, American Anthropologist, Modern Asian Studies, Comparative Studies on Society and History, and Contributions to Indian Sociology. He is the author of Marrying for a Future: Transnational Sri Lankan Tamil Marriages in the Shadow of War, 2019 published by University of Washington Press. His anthropological research intersects with the disciplines of anthropology, history and philosophy.

REGISTRATION

Registration is closed, and instructions on how to participate in this hybrid talk has been sent out to registered attendees. Please write to aritm@nus.edu.sg if you would like to attend the event.