The UBC South Asia Research Colloquium offers a forum for specialists in South Asia to share their research in front of an interdisciplinary audience. The format will consist of a research presentation of about forty-five minutes followed by questions and comments from the audience for about half an hour.
Hosted by the Department of Asian Studies, University of British Columbia, this is a recurring event that is open to students and faculty of UBC and other academic institutions.
Should you have any questions, please contact Mahnoor Lone at ml041296@mail.ubc.ca.
Upcoming events:
Gandhi’s Silence
Friday, September 8, 2023 | 2:00-4:00 PM (PT)
Auditorium, UBC Asian Centre, 1871 West Mall, Vancouver (map here)
Guest Speaker: Dr. Faisal Devji, Professor of Indian History, University of Oxford
Past events:
Medicine, Politics and Policy in India: Current and Future Research
Friday, April 21, 2023 | 12:30-2:00 PM (PT)
Room 604 (seminar room), UBC Asian Centre, 1871 West Mall, Vancouver (map here)
Guest Speaker: Dr. Veena Sriram, Assistant Professor, School of Public Policy and Global Affairs (SPPGA) and the School of Population and Public Health (SPPH), University of British Columbia
Tech Time is Out of Joint: Rethinking South Asia’s Long Technological Twentieth Century
Friday, March 24, 2023 | 12:30-2:00 PM (PT)
Room 604 (seminar room), UBC Asian Centre, 1871 West Mall, Vancouver (map here)
Guest Speaker: Dr. Kavita Philip, Professor and President’s Excellence Chair in Network Cultures, Department of English Language and Literatures, University of British Columbia
Sherpas as a Transnational Indigenous People
Friday, March 3, 2023 | 12:30-2:00 PM (PT)
Room 604 (seminar room), UBC Asian Centre, 1871 West Mall, Vancouver (map here)
Guest Speaker: Dr. Pasang Sherpa, Assistant Professor in Lifeways in Indigenous Asia, Department of Asian Studies, Critical Indigenous Studies, University of British Columbia
Labour(ing) on land in urban India : “Capture” as spatial analytic
Friday, February 10 | 12:30-2:00 PM (PT)
Room 604 (seminar room), UBC Asian Centre, 1871 West Mall, Vancouver (map here)
Guest Speaker: Dr. Priti Narayan, Assistant Professor and Asa and Kashmir (A&K) Johal Chair of Indian Research, Director of the Centre for India and South Asian Research (CISAR 2022/23), University of British Columbia
A Choice Between Co-destruction and Co-prosperity: Indian Views on Nuclear Technology and the Atomic Bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
Friday, January 20, 2023 | 12:30-2:00 PM (PT)
Room 604 (seminar room), UBC Asian Centre, 1871 West Mall, Vancouver (map here)
Guest Speaker: Dr. M.V. Ramana, Professor and Simons Chair in Disarmament, Global and Human Security at the School of Public Policy and Global Affairs (SPPGA), University of British Columbia
India is among the nine countries that are known to possess nuclear weapons; it is also among the 32 countries (plus Taiwan) that operate nuclear power plants. Many of the country’s leaders and scientists have been interested in nuclear technology since the late 1930s. In this talk, I will discuss media coverage of, and views expressed by political and scientific leaders in India about, nuclear technology in the first decade and a half after the U.S. atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The time frame is chosen as a way to capture the development of different strands of thought, but also ensuring that these views are not affected by the next major nuclear crisis, the Cuban missile crisis of 1962. Time permitting, I will talk about the coverage in one prominent Indian newspaper, the Tribune.
[CANCELLED] Mahatma Gandhi, Richard Gregg and Integral Nonviolence
Friday, November 25, 2022 | 12:30-2:00 PM (PT)
Room 604 (seminar room), UBC Asian Centre, 1871 West Mall, Vancouver (map here)
Guest Speaker: Dr. James Tully, Professor Emeritus of Political Science and Law, University of Victoria
The Art of Agency in a Self-Effacing Universe
Friday, November 4, 2022 | 12:30-2:00 PM (PT)
Room 604 (seminar room), UBC Asian Centre, 1871 West Mall, Vancouver (map here)
Guest Speaker: Dr. Catherine Prueitt, Assistant Professor, Department of Philosophy, University of British Columbia
Professor Prueitt argues that the sophisticated theory of play that is central to Abhinavagupta’s (10th-11th century Kashmir) understanding of creation, both artistic and cosmic, provides a robust framework for supporting and extending C. Thi Nguyen’s account of aesthetic striving play in Games: Agency as Art (2020). Abhinavagupta’s framework supports Nguyen’s by providing technical details of how layered and fluid modes of agency are constructed and maintained, and extends it by explaining the inherent link between depersonalized agency and aesthetic experiences.
Bringing in Abhinavagupta’s understanding of the controversial Quiescent Rasa shows that the experience of aesthetic striving play is at the heart of aesthetic experience because it mirrors the liberated experience of depersonalized agency, which expresses itself in acts of imagination that constitute subject/object structured worlds simply for the joy of experiencing differentiated forms.
What is Colonialism? The Meaning of a Twentieth-Century Political Category
Friday, October 21, 2022 | 12:30-2:00 PM (PT)
Room 604 (seminar room), UBC Asian Centre, 1871 West Mall, Vancouver (map here)
Guest Speaker: Dr. Nazmul Sultan, Assistant Professor of Political Theory, Department of Political Science, University of British Columbia