Planetary Futures and the Global South
IASA
Bienniel Conference
Mohanlal
Sukhadia University,Udaipur
16-18 January 2018
In association with:
DAAD-Global South Network, University of
Tuebingen
JNU-UPE-II Project “Asian Crossroads:
Indic Neighbourhoods, Global Connections,”
Project on Science and Spirituality, JNU
Samvad India Foundation, New Delhi
India has been called the “cross-roads” of the
entire region of the Indian ocean oecumene, literally on the “road to
everywhere.”[1]
For almost every important intellectual, political, and cultural current from
East to the West and from West to the East, India became the point of
transition, mediation, or even fruition. This is as true of the evolution of
British colonialism in Asia and Australia as it is of prior times. The
question, however, is how these connections might play out in the future, but
also in terms of how futures are to be imagined, designed, and executed from
hereon. It is this exciting discursive terrain of future studies that this
conference fouces on, with special referene to India, Australia, and the Global
South.
The aim of this conference is to study some of
these cross currents of Global Futures, to document available knowledge about
them, explore alternative futures for Indic-Australian inter-relationships,and
to create new paradigms for understanding theglobalisation of both India and Australia
in this light. Our main objective, then, would be to try to explore Indic-Australian
connections from colonialism to global futures and begin to explore the range
of ideas and processes implicit to these processes. With this view we plan to engage with the history, politics, and cultural formations of cross-connections
between India, Australia, and the Global South, including Africa and Latin
America, giving primacy to oceanic and cross-continentalintellectual and
cultural traffic. In addition, the conference will focus on issues such as
traditional knowledge systems, spiritual and sacred practices, Indo-Australasiannationalisms,
transfers of science, technology, and culture, and relations in social practices,
arts, and media in the region, especially as they impact our thinking on Global
Futures.
At its most
ambitious, this project is about “re-presenting”
India, Australia, and the Global Southnot just in a post-imperialistic,
increasingly globalized world-system, but beyond these into systematic thinking
and planning of planetary futures. The word “represent” is used here in both
its commonly understood senses, as likeness,
bringing to life orgoing back to its Latin root esse or presence, represent
as making present. But every
description is, necessarily, also an interpretation. So to represent Indo-Australian
connections in their oceanic, global, and futures contextswould also be to reinterpret
them. The other meaning of represent is to stand or speak for; to resisting
others’ definitions of us, so that we, in India, Australia, and others in the
Global South, speak for ourselves, taking charge of how we represent ourselves.[2]
Indeed, both ways of looking at Indic-Australian connections are relevant to
our conference.
In our shared contexts,
this might imply the constructing of new disciplinary paradigms or
institutional apparatuses. It might also mean competing for legitimation in how
our regions are understood or studied, finallyto declare ourselves as
interested parties or stake-holders in such a process of designing Global
Futures. It would also implicate us in challenging other, for example, imperial
representations and to offer alternatives to them. The composition of research
groups, with experts from the various communities of India, Australia, and the
Global South, to examine their inter-relationships, and, finally, their
connections with flows in capital, culture, science and technology, along with
the futures of such, would be the ultimate outcome of this conference.
Themes of the Conference
1. Global Futures for India, Australia,
and other parts of the Global South, including Africa and Latin America
2. Crossroads – roots and routes in the
India-Australia dialogue
3. Global-Local knowledge flows
4. Alternative Global South: Who’s
Futures?
5. Indian Ocean: Culture, Geography,
Security
6. Heritage Futures: Epistemology and
Identity
7. History and its Shadows
8. Spiritual Pragmatics
9. Traditional Knowledge, Sacred
Practice and Spirituality
10. Nationalisms and Beyond: The
Politics of local-global interaction
11. Hybrid Knowledge Futures: Science,
culture, technology in the India-Australia context, and the Global South,
including Africa and Latin America
12. Representations- Media and the Arts
– Re-Orient
13. Research as Resistance: Voice and
Optimism in a shrinking world
14. Pathways to Meaning and Co-Creation
– research collaborations across borders
Last date for the submission of
Abstract: 15 December, 2017
Approval of abstracts: 20 December, 2017
Registration Fee:
Foreign
Delegates (with accommodation): USD300
Foreign
Delegates (without accommodation): USD 80
Indian
Outstation Delegates (with accommodation): INR 5000
Indian
Delegates (without accommodation): INR 2500
Special
discounted fee for students (without accommodation): INR 1000
Contact:
General Secretary, IASA and
Conference Coordinator,
Professor Pradeep Trikha,
Mohanlal Sukhadia University,
Udaipur:iasapradeeptrikha@gmail.com
[1]In her path-breaking study, Before
European Hegemony: The World System A.D. 1250-1350 (New York: Oxford
University Press. 1991), Janet Abu-Lughod, not only gave a detailed description
of the larger Indian oceanic geo-political neighbourhood before European
hegemony, but decribed India thus.
[2]These
two meanings of represent have been encapsulated as “portrait” and “proxy” by
noted post-colonial critic, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak in her much cited essay
“Can the Subaltern Speak?” Spivak, following Marx, invokes the German words, darstellungandvertretung
to suggest these two meanings respectively.
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