Resisting Occupation in Kashmir | A Conversation with Haley Duschinski, Mona Bhan; Moderated by Suchitra Vijayan

Cosponsored event with The Polis Project

 
Join Dr. Mona Bhan and Dr. Haley Duschinski in conversation with Suchitra Vijayan, about their  recently published edited book, Resisting Occupation in Kashmir, which analyzes the social and legal logic of India’s occupation of Kashmir in relation to colonialism, militarization, power, democracy, and sovereignty, focusing specifically on the years between 2010 and 2014. Foregrounding the voices of Kashmiri scholars, the book traces how Kashmiri youth used music, rap, art, and other modes of cultural production to reimagine the freedom struggle in the twenty-first century, and offered alternative ways of conceptualizing the past, present, and future of the region. The conversation will discuss how the intensification of state violence and repression since 2016 has transformed the nature of resistance in Kashmir and strengthened global civil society initiatives that challenge India’s illegal occupation of Kashmir.
Dr. Mona Bhan is Otto L. Sonder Jr. Professor of Anthropology at DePauw University, Indiana. She is also the co-editor of HIMALAYA, the journal of the Association for Nepal and Himalayan Studies. Bhan has authored Counterinsurgency, Development, and the Politics of Identity: From Warfare to Welfare? (Routledge); and co-authored Climate without Nature: A Critical Anthropology of the Anthropocene (Cambridge). She recently co-edited the book Resisting Occupation in Kashmir (UPenn), with scholars from the Critical Kashmir Studies collective of which she is a founder member.
Dr. Haley Duschinski is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Center for Law, Justice & Culture at Ohio University. She is a legal and political anthropologist with research specializations in violence, war, and power; law and society; human rights, militarization, and impunity; and law and memory in Kashmir. She is co-editor of the recently published edited volume Resisting Occupation in Kashmir (University of Pennsylvania Press). She is a founding member of the Critical Kashmir Studies scholarly collective and co-editor of a recent special issue of Journal of Legal Pluralism and Unofficial Law on comparative studies of occupation.
Suchitra Vijayan is a Barrister-at-law and the Founding Director of The Polis Project, Inc a New York-based humanities collective and research center. As an attorney previously worked for the United Nations war crimes tribunal for Yugoslavia and Rwanda. She co-founded and was the Legal Director of Resettlement Legal Aid Project, Cairo that gives legal aid for Iraqi refugee. As a graduate student at Yale, she was researching and documenting stories along the Af-Pak border. She was embedded with the ISAF forces – 172 infantry brigade, in Paktika Province, Afghanistan conducting research on the counterinsurgency practices in the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. Her book on India’s borders is forthcoming.
This semester-long series of conversations examines the interplay between bodies and borders through a variety of contextual frameworks, including migration, race and nationalism, environmental degradation, and war.