Events

The conference is organised by the Asia Research Institute at the National University of Singapore; with support from the Newton Fellowship funded by British Academy and Royal Society.

What does it mean to live in precarious spaces and times in Asia? What do violence and uncertainty tell us about the force of life through which capital, mobility, and bodies materialize and are experienced? While anthropology and other disciplines have classically located the emergence of life in neatly circumscribed villages, cities and nations, in recent decades, the bounded-ness of social life has been challenged. Increasing scholarly attention to identities, margins, and transnational flows has also entailed extensive engagements with violence ranging from the everyday to the spectacular.

We posit that the force of life or narrated another way, life force shows how lives are re-configured, reconstituted and recovered through new imaginaries and actions in violent spaces and times. We aim to engage life and force in a conversation with each other through two analytic entry points. Firstly, we argue that life in times of protracted uncertainties exerts vigor and force and ushers social, economic and political possibilities. Secondly, force as speed, momentum, and mobility transforms subjectivities, politics, and life itself in precarious times. Read together, these shed light on capital, value and bodily conversions, and departs from seeing political and social instabilities as momentary, celebrated, or exceptional. On the one hand, the force of life stands apart from hybrid assertions in de-territorialized spaces. On the other, it reclaims life from being a state of exception where states and laws strip bodies of their human conditions and the right to live, what Agamben following Schmidt calls the “bare life”.

This two-day inter-disciplinary conference covers ethnographic, philosophical, spatial, and historical interventions. We propose to revisit questions of time, space, politics, capital, and old and new belongings across the vast continent of Asia. Papers include studies on refugee camps, pilgrimage buses, trans-gendered bodies, urban transformations, borders, smuggling, brokerage, and environmental disasters. These are based on empirical research in Bangladesh, China, India, Jordan, Lebanon, Malaysia, Pakistan, Philippines, Singapore, Sri Lanka, Turkey and Vietnam.

KEYNOTE SPEAKERS 

Professor Partha Chatterjee 
Professor of Anthropology and of Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies, Columbia University, USA

Professor Veena Das
Krieger-Eisenhower Professor of Anthropology, Johns Hopkins University, USA

REGISTRATION

Admission is free. Kindly register early as seats are available on a first come, first served basis. We would gratefully request that you RSVP to Sharon at arios@nus.edu.sg indicating your name, and organization/affiliation.

CONTACT DETAILS

Conference Convenors

Dr Malini SUR
Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore

Dr Sidharthan MAUNAGURU
South Asian Studies Programme, National University of Singapore

Professor Brenda YEOH
Asia Research Institute, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences,
and Department of Geography, National University of Singapore

Secretariat

Miss Sharon ONG
Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore
E | arios@nus.edu.sg