Dr. Ranabir Samaddar will deliver the keynote lecture at the South Asia conference (Y-SASM 2021) this year.
Everyday forms of state formation reveal how the state manifests itself while also elucidating how people engage with the state. This conference seeks to unpack the role and authority of the state in everyday lives, with a particular focus on South Asia. A careful unpacking of the everyday state, through an interdisciplinary approach, would enable us to gauge the complexity and paradoxes of state power and the ways in which it affects everyday life and the art of governance. Current developments in South Asia suggest the imminent need to reconceptualise the Everyday State. The history and specificities of South Asia provide ample scope to investigate the distinct yet intertwined means through which colonial and post-colonial everyday state has reconstituted itself alongside the development of peculiar kinds of governmental rationality. This conference provides the forum for scholars working on South Asia to present their research on the Everyday State in a wide range of contexts.
Picking up on some of the broader themes that undergird ongoing interdisciplinary exchanges on the subject matter, Dr. Ranabir Samaddar will deliver the keynote lecture at the South Asia conference this year.
READ MORE about and register for the Young South Asia Scholars’ Meet (Y-SASM) HERE.
Dr. Ranabir Samaddar is the Director of the Calcutta Research Group, Kolkata. He has worked extensively on issues related to migration and mobility, labour and urbanisation, and political struggles in the South Asian context. He is considered one of the most influential theorists in migration and migration studies. Some of his most recent works include the “Borders of an Epidemic: Covid-19 and Migrant Workers” (2020), “The Postcolonial Age of Migration” (2020), “Burdens of an Epidemic: A Policy Perspective on Covid-19 and Migrant Labour” (2020), and “Karl Marx and the Postcolonial Age” (2018). Apart from these, among his most influential works is “the Migrant Nation: Transborder Migration from Bangladesh to West Bengal” (1999).