CFP: CSAS 31st Annual Spring Symposium - "Brave New South Asia: Science, Technology and Society"



CALL FOR PAPERS

The Center for South Asian Studies at the University of Hawai'i <http://www.hawaii.edu/csas/>invites
paper and panel proposals for its 31th Annual Spring Symposium

Brave New South Asia: Science, Technology and Society

DATE CHANGE: April 15-17, 2014, in Honolulu, Hawai'i

Note that the new dates of the symposium are April 15-17. 2014. Since April
18 is Good Friday, observed in Hawaii as a state holiday, we are holding the symposium April 15-17 instead of the previously announced April 16-18.

Deadline to submit proposals: January 24 (Friday), 2014

Inventions and innovations have a long history in South Asia. During the last three decades of globalization and neoliberalism, however, practices and discourse have both amplified the attention to developments in science and technology in South Asia while intensifying debates over their promise and dangers. This symposium invites critical reflections on science and technology as they transform the relationship between humans and their environments and reshape our conceptions of the human and natural in the context of South Asia and the diaspora. We are interested in a conversation across the sciences, social sciences and humanities that examines the interface between science and technology and the varied social, political and cultural ecologies as they have developed over time to bring us to our current moment -- when South Asia figures as an incubator of innovations and as a striking example of their utopic and dystopic manifestations.

Please send 200-word abstracts for individual papers by email to csas@hawaii.edu. If proposing an entire panel, please also include a paragraph-length rationale and a proposed title for the panel along with paper titles and abstracts. Please contact csas@hawaii.edu, if you have questions.
A limited amount of free lodging will be available to participants.

For more information, visit the Center for South Asian Studies website
at:

Our panels will be anchored by keynotes delivered by:
Abha Sur, Women's & Gender Studies, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Dr. Sur is a scientist, who looks at the history of science and production of scientific knowledge. She is the author of Dispersed Radiance: Caste, Gender, and Modern Science in India (Navayana, 2011) Stacy Leigh Pigg, Sociology and Anthropology, Simon Fraser University.
Dr.
Pigg has done extensive research on the medicalization of sexuality in Nepal and has published numerous articles that link science studies to analyses of culture, language and power. She co-edited Sex in
Development:
Science, Sexuality, and Morality in Global Perspective with Vincanne Adams (Duke University Press, 2005).
Shafqat Hussain, Anthropology, Trinity College. Trained in political and social ecology, Dr. Hussain’s research in Pakistan focuses on the co-constitution of human societies and the environment. He is completing his book, From Savages to Environmentalists: A History of Production of Remoteness in the Western Himalayas (Yale University Press, Forthcoming).

The topics for paper submissions can include:


    - Technologies in agriculture
    - Resource management
    - Environmentalism
    - Genetic modification/transgenesis
    - Medicine and pharmaceuticals
    - Reproductive technologies
    - Management of sexualities
    - Tissue and biological exchange
    - Biometrics
    - Nuclear energy, disarmament and peace
    - Information technologies
    - Biopolitics
    - Bioethics
    - The human and post-human
    - Governmentality
    - Futurity

--
Rohini Acharya
Coordinator
Center for South Asian Studies
MFA Candidate in Dance
(808) 956-5652



--
Peter H. Hoffenberg
Associate Professor of History
Editor, *Bulletin of the Pacific Circle*
Sakamaki Hall
University of Hawaii at Manoa
Honolulu, HI 96822
USA
Phone: (808) 956-8497


Caspar: "So it's clear what I'm saying?"
Leo: "... As mud."

Miller's Crossing, Coen Brothers, 1990