SASNET organizes a conference entitled ”Modern Matters: Negotiating the Future in Everyday Life in South Asia” from 20 – 22 September 2016 at Lund University. The conference will explore what it means to consider oneself modern or outside the limits of modernity, in an extremely diverse region. It will also examine how the notion of modernity is experienced, contested, and negotiated in South Asia within the broader promise and hope of the ‘Asian century’.
The three keynote speakers will be Faisal Devji, University of Oxford, UK; Dipesh Chakrabarty, University of Chicago, USA; and Sumi Madhok, London School of Economics, UK. SASNET now invites papers for the eight panels being accepted:
Panel 1. Religion and Modernity in South Asia (chaired by Clemens Cavalin); Panel 2. Mapping Subaltern Modernities in Neoliberal India (chaired by Alf Gunvald Nilsen & Kenneth Bo Nielsen); Panel 3. Beyond the Desirable: Critical Perspectives on Media-Modernity (chaired by Britta Ohm, Per Ståhlberg, and Vibodh Parthasarathi); Panel 4. Staging Marriage and Modernity among the Middle classes in South Asia (chaired by Ajay Bailey, and Anindita Datta); Panel 5. The Transformation of Caste (chaired by Winnie Bothe and Staffan Lindberg); Panel 6. Youthful modernities: negotiating with the past, the present and the future (chaired by Ravinder Kaur, Sanolde Desai, and Rajni Palriwala); Panel 7. Women and Gender in South Asian Modernity: Vulnerabilities and Violence (chaired by Ulrika Andersson); and Panel 8. Open panel – for papers that do not fit any of the other panels but make an orginal contribution to understandings of modernity in South Asia.
Abstracts should be between 200-300 words and include a short biography including institutional affiliation not exceeding 100 words. Paper submissions should be received no later than Saturday 30 April 2016 at conference@sasnet.lu.se. Information about limited travel grants for exceptional contributions will be announced shortly. Full information about the conference, themes and fees.