RSS FeedUpcoming EventsBashabi Fraser | The Primacy of Creativity in Rabindranath Tagore, April 4https://events.berkeley.edu/live/events/236729-the-3rd-maya-mitra-das-lecture-on-tagore-by-prof-bash

The Institute for South Asia Studies and the Tagore Program on Literature, Culture and Philosophy at UC Berkeley and are privileged to have Bashabi Fraser, the Director of the Scottish Centre of Tagore Studies at Edinburgh Napier University, deliver our third Maya Mitra Das Annual Lecture on Tagore at UC Berkeley.

Event moderated by Rahul Parson. Assistant Professor of Hindi Literature in the Department of South and Southeast Asian Studies at University of California, Berkeley

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SPEAKER BIO

Bashabi Fraser CBE, HonFASL is an award winning poet, children’s writer, editor and academic. She is the recipient of a CBE (2021 The Queen’s New Year Honours) for Education (her academic work), culture (poetry) and cultural integration (her bridge building projects linking Scotland and India) and was made Honorary Fellow of the Association of Scottish Studies in 2022. She has been declared Outstanding Woman of Scotland by Saltire Society in 2015.

Bashabi is Professor Emerita of English and Creative Writing, Edinburgh Napier University and Founder Director of Scottish Centre of Tagore Studies (ScoTs). She is also an Honorary Fellow, Centre for South Asian Studies, University of Edinburgh, Honorary Fellow of the Association of Scottish Literary Studies (ASLS), Scotland and a Royal Literary Fund Fellow. She is the Chief Editor of the academic and creative peer-reviewed international e-journal, Gitanjali and Beyond and on the Editorial Board of several international peer-reviewed journals and is on the Editorial Board of Writers Mosaic, a Royal Literary Fund division..

Her work traverses continents in transnational literary projects. She has authored and edited 25 books, published several articles articles and chapters in academic and creative books/journals and has been widely anthologized as a poet. Her recent publications include Habitat (2023), Lakshmi’s Footprints and Paisely Patterns: Perspectives on Scoto-Indian Literary and Cultural Interrelations (2023), The Patient Dignity (2021) and Rabindranath Tagore (2019).

Her other recent awards include Swami Vivekananda University, India’s Vivek Jyoti Sanman, 2023, the UK Bengali Convention (UKBC) Lifetime Achievement Award, 2022, the Dr Maheswar Neog IPPL Award for Poetry, 2022; Kavi Salam from Poetry Paradigm and Voice of the Republic in India in 2019; the Word Masala Foundation Award for Excellence in Poetry in 2017, Special Felicitation as a Poet on International Women’s Day by Public Relations Society of India, March 2017, Rabindra Bharati Society Honour, 2014, Women Empowered: Arts and Culture Award in 2010 and the AIO Prize for Literary Services in Scotland in 2009.

Her other grants and funding awards include the Indian Council for Cultural Relations, International Senior Research Fellow ( 2016-17), UK-India Educational Research Initiatives (UKIERI) grant, funded jointly by the British Council and the University Grants Commission (UGC), India (2015-2017), Royal Literary Fund Fellow (2018-2020, 2012-2015), Carnegie Research Grant (2008), Edinburgh Napier University Research Grant (2008), British Council Consultancy (2008-2009), Scottish Arts Council Publication Grant (2008), Scottish Arts Council Writer’s Grant with Edinburgh Puppet Lab (2003-4), EMMA Best Book Award, Runner up for Rainbow World (2003-4), Moray Foundation Grant, University of Edinburgh (2001 and 2000), Scottish Arts Council Literature Grant, for anthology (2000), British Academy Research Grant (1999-2000), University Grants Commission of India Teacher Fellowship, , Sept 1984-Feb 1988.

Bashabi has been an Adjudicator for several national and international creative writing competitions. Recently, she has been a Judge for the Non-Fiction Book Prize and the Scottish National Book of the Year Award for Saltire Society, Scotland (2022) and the Kavya Prize, sponsored by Glasgow University (2022).

Bashabi is Honorary Vice President of the Association of Scottish Literary Studies (ASLS), an executive committee member of Scottish PEN, and Writers at Risk and Writers for Peace Committees (Scotland), a Trustee of Patrick Geddes Trust and the Kolkata Scottish Heritage Trust, Patron of the Federation of Writers (Scotland). She is the founder and President of the Advisory Board of the Intercultural Poetry and Performance Library (IPPL) in Kolkata; she is on the Advisory Board of the V&A Museum in Dundee and the Indian Association of Scottish Studies, led by Bankura University. Bashabi is on the Editorial Board of several international peer-reviewed journals. She lives in Edinburgh with her husband, Neil Fraser.

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Launched in Fall 2019, and housed in the Institute for South Asia Studies, the Tagore Program on Literature, Culture and Philosophy at UC Berkeley, is the first of its kind in the US. Designed to showcase the life and legacy of Rabindranath Tagore, the program sponsors talks and workshops on Tagore, as well as semester-long visiting professorships in Tagore Studies at UC Berkeley. Read more about the program HERE.
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PARKING INFORMATION
Please note that parking is not always easily available in Berkeley. Take public transportation if possible or arrive early to secure your spot.

Event is FREE and OPEN to the public.

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CANCELED: [Talk Rescheduled. NEW DATE FRI SEPT 20, 2024] Bertie Kibreah | Debate on the Dais: Shrine Performance and Discursive Devotion in Bangladesh, April 12https://events.berkeley.edu/live/events/229485-a-lecture-by-the-2023-bangabandhu-sheikh-mujibur-rahm

THIS EVENT HAS BEEN POSTPONED TO THE FALL SEMESTER. NEW DATE FRI, SEPT 20, 2024.

 

A lecture by the Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman Research Fellow for 2023, Bertie Kibreah, Assistant Professor of Ethnomusicology, School of Music, University of South Florida.

Brian Bond, Lecturer (Music of India), Department of Music and Brent Eng, PhD Candidate, Department of Anthropology will serve as discussants at the event. 

Event moderated by Elora Shehabuddin, Professor of Gender & Women’s Studies and Global Studies; Director, Subir and Malini Chowdhury Center for Bangladesh Studies, UC Berkeley

TALK ABSTRACT: What does it mean for a shrine-based debate to be a devotional performance? Echoing recent works on contemporary Sufisms that highlight the intersectionality of communities, repertoires, and narratives, Bangladesh’s bicr gn (“songs of rumination”) is an extemporized wellspring for articulating concurrent devotional subjectivities. In this performance, a network of interlocutors engage in an aggregative musicality that combines versified, saintly, and polemical elements into a staged discourse on loss, alterity, and sometimes absurdism. Drawing attention to interlocking tropes in ritual theory, migration studies, and the anthropology of media, this discursive devotionalism can be understood as a profoundly generative negotiation of space through converging pilgrimage routes, shrine committees, itinerant programming, stylized listening practices, and a popular folk music revival. Ultimately, bicr gn reifies a performance of devotion that is meandering, contingent, and suppositional, and is also informed by past and present border negotiations, inter-religious pieties, a transglobal citizenry, and Sufi media—within, between, and beyond Bengals.

SPEAKER BIO: Bertie Kibreah is Assistant Professor of Ethnomusicology at the University of South Florida. He joined the University of South Florida’s Music Faculty in 2022. He is an ethnomusicologist and South Asianist (PhD, University of Chicago), with interests in re-sounding the greater region of Bengal—an enduring focal point in South Asia—to be more inclusive of sonic histories and contemporary music life in Bangladesh, the Bay of Bengal, and the “Banglashere.” Bertie’s research is shaped by discourses of devotion, modernity, and migration—especially through the performative lens of pilgrimage, cultural industries, Sufi feminisms, and borderland musicking. He frequently draw on theories of difference (memory, partition, genocide studies), interconnectivity (Inter-Asian, Indian Ocean, Adivasi, and Asian American studies) as well as orality-aurality (sound studies, affect studies, the anthropology of media).

Bertie’s current book project explores and complicates trajectories of devotion through sonic geographies of the Bengal river delta, the musical placemaking of shrines, and the collectivized impressions of folk festivals within, between, and beyond Bengals (including adjacent Bengali pluralities). A second book project of his is concerned with intergenerational timbres and devotional memory in the larger realm of Bangladeshi global citizenries, as refracted by recent labor reforms in the Arab Gulf, newer migration routes into Europe via the Mediterranean, and the often overlooked “ethnoburbs” of Bangladeshi Americans.

Trained on the tabla, a prominent percussion instrument in South Asia, Bertie also sings in a variety of languages and performs on a number of additional instruments—especially from Bengal—including the dotara lute. The breath of his musical explorations—across linguistic and sonic borders—is fueled by the civic awareness of public humanities work and the artistic interactions of practitioners and communities.

Bertie is the recipient of a number of awards, most recently a research grant from USF College of the Arts, as well as the Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman Research Award administered through the Malini Chowdhury Center for Bangladesh Studies at UC Berkeley. Bertie is also incoming vice president for the Southeast/Caribbean chapter of the Society for Ethnomusicology.

 

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The Bangabandhu Research Award allows us to bring one or two graduate students or early career faculty members each year from accredited institutions in the United States and in Europe to share their research on Bangabandhu and/or Bangladesh with the UC Berkeley community. This award has been established with the generous support of the US Bangabandhu Parishad, California.

Established in 2013 with a generous gift from the Subir & Malini Chowdhury Foundation, The Subir & Malini Chowdhury Center for Bangladesh Studies at UC Berkeley champions the study of Bangladesh’s cultures, peoples and history. The first of its kind in the US, the Center’s mission is to create an innovative model combining research, scholarships, the promotion of art and culture, and the building of ties between institutions in Bangladesh and the University of California.

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For DIRECTIONS to the Institute please enter “Institute for South Asia Studies” in your google maps or click this GOOGLE MAPS LINK.

PARKING INFORMATION
Please note that parking is not always easily available in Berkeley. Take public transportation if possible or arrive early to secure your spot.

Event is FREE and OPEN to the public.

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If you require an accommodation for effective communication (ASL interpreting/CART captioning, alternative media formats, etc.) or information about campus mobility access features in order to fully participate in this event, please contact Puneeta Kala at pkala@berkeley.edu with as much advance notice as possible and at least 7-10 days in advance of the event.

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Mirza Taslima Sultana | Trolling in Bangladesh, April 12https://events.berkeley.edu/live/events/229668-talk-by-anthropologist-mirza-taslima-title-tbd

A talk by Mirza Taslima, Professor of Anthropology at Jahangirnagar University, Bangladesh.

Anirban Gupta-Nigam, Associate Director, Institute for South Asia Studies, will serve as discussant.

Event moderated by Elora Shehabuddin, Professor of Gender & Women’s Studies and Global Studies and Director, Subir and Malini Chowdhury Center for Bangladesh Studies, UC Berkeley

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Event live streamed on FB at: ChowdhuryCenter atUCBerkeley

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Abstract

The subject of discussion is the researcher’s most current investigation into trolling in Bangladesh. As the nation’s usage of the internet and social media has grown, so has trolling. The number of people trolling celebs and politicians as well as regular people is rising. Bullying and hate speech were prevalent in public areas, including streets, workplaces, and educational facilities. Nonetheless, the situation is quite concerning due to hate speech that is encouraged online. From 2013 to 2016, 30 bloggers and on 25 April 2016, 2 LGBTQ persons were killed. According to Parsa Sanjana Sajid (2020) LGBTQ communities and sex workers initially found the social media spaces liberating but soon found it to be a dangerous terrain because of these killings. LGBTQ peoples, Sex workers and the bloggers were trolled with receiving death and rape threats.Thus, the researcher explores the beginnings online trolling in this talk and identifies many types of trolling through social media research as well as interviewing the individuals who experienced troll, such as trolling that is sponsored by the state (Nyst and Monaco, 2018), trolling that is motivated by gender, and trolling that is based on ethnicity. The study argues that In the post-truth context (Hannan,2018) of Bangladesh the religious extremists threaten the bloggers or it involves gendertrolling (Mantilla, 2013) of celebrities or trolling by bots to the groups raising dissenting voices, all are affecting the formation of public opinion in the cyberspace of Bangladeshi netizens. While the trolls are active in shaping the cyberspace, and the public space according to their respective goals, the research findings are similar to Lacy and Mookherjee’s (2020) study, that is currently in Bangladesh the head of the government could not be trolled on social media and for this many were arrested under the Information and communication Technology act (2006) and Digital Security Act (2018); though in 2023, a new law, Cyber Security Act was employed, those who faced the charges under the previous acts have been facing the trials, sometimes without the specific police charges. The study finds that Bangladeshi individuals are unable to exercise their constitutionally guaranteed freedoms in cyberspace, and in order to silence their voices, prevalent standards are replicated there and expanded to include a wide range of infractions.

About the Speaker

Mirza Taslima is Professor of Anthropology at Jahangirnagar University, Bangladesh. She is currently a Fulbright Visiting Scholar in the Department of Gender and Women Studies at UC Berkeley. Her research focuses on gender-based trolling, in which she aims to compare the ethnography of trolled people and their agencies between Bangladesh and US contexts. She is conducting an interdisciplinary study in this project to theorize on the formation of the public in cyberspace of Bangladesh and the US and to consider the various expressions of democracy and civil rights. She did her field research in Bangladesh and now is establishing contacts to conduct interviews in the US context.

Dr. Mirza Taslima did her Ph.D. on Childlessness and IVF in Bangladesh at the Center for Gender and Women Studies in Lancaster University, UK.

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Established in 2013 with a generous gift from the Subir & Malini Chowdhury Foundation, The Subir & Malini Chowdhury Center for Bangladesh Studies at UC Berkeley champions the study of Bangladesh’s cultures, peoples and history. The first of its kind in the US, the Center’s mission is to create an innovative model combining research, scholarships, the promotion of art and culture, and the building of ties between institutions in Bangladesh and the University of California.

Like us on FACEBOOK

For DIRECTIONS to the Institute please enter “Institute for South Asia Studies” in your google maps or click this GOOGLE MAPS LINK.

PARKING INFORMATION
Please note that parking is not always easily available in Berkeley. Take public transportation if possible or arrive early to secure your spot.

Event is FREE and OPEN to the public.

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[On Zoom] Ranjan Ghosh | Tagore in the Age of Anthropocene: Plastic Nature (The Tagore Visiting Scholar Lecture for 2024), April 26https://events.berkeley.edu/live/events/237376-on-zoom-ranjan-ghosh-the-tagore-lecture-for-2024

The Tagore Program on Literature, Culture and Philosophy at UC Berkeley invites you for the 3rd Tagore Visiting Scholar Lecture by literary and cultural theorist and the Tagore Visiting Scholar at UC Berkeley for Spring 2024, Ranjan Ghosh.

Event moderated by Rahul Parson. Assistant Professor of Hindi Literature in the Department of South and Southeast Asian Studies at University of California, Berkeley

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DATE: Friday, April 26, 2024
TIME: 9 am Berkeley | 9:30 pm Kolkata (+1 day) | Calculate Your Local Time

REGISTER ONLINE

This event will also be live streamed on the Institute’s FB page: ISASatUCBerkeley
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SPEAKER BIO

Dr. Ghosh is an Indian academic and thinker who teaches at the Department of English, University of North Bengal, India. His wide-ranging scholarly work spans across the fields of comparative literature, comparative philosophy, philosophy of education, environmental humanities, critical and cultural theory, and Intellectual history.  His many books include Thinking Literature across Continents (Duke University Press, 2016, with J Hillis Miller), Philosophy and Poetry: Continental Perspectives ed. (Columbia University Press, 2019), Plastic Tagore (Oxford University Press, forthcoming) and the trilogy that he is completing to establish the discipline of plastic humanities: The Plastic Turn (Cornell University Press, 2022), Plastic Figures (Cornell University Press, 2024, forthcoming) and Plastic Literature (forthcoming).

He has been an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow.

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Launched in Fall 2019, and housed in the Institute for South Asia Studies, the Tagore Program on Literature, Culture and Philosophy at UC Berkeley, is the first of its kind in the US. Designed to showcase the life and legacy of Rabindranath Tagore, the program sponsors talks and workshops on Tagore, as well as semester-long visiting professorships in Tagore Studies at UC Berkeley. Read more about the program HERE.
_________________

Like us on FACEBOOK
Follow us on TWITTER

The event is FREE and OPEN to the public.

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Mohammad Tareq Hasan | Moral Jeopardies and Exorcisms in the Global Production Network: Auditing, CSR, and ‘New’ Dispossession in a Bangladeshi Garment Factory, May 2https://events.berkeley.edu/live/events/243754-mohammad-tareq-hasan-moral-jeopardies-and-exorcisms-i

A talk by Mohammad Tareq Hasan, Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Dhaka, on how regulatory instruments, i.e., an auditing culture, has shaped the working conditions in a Bangladeshi garment factory post the 2013 Rana Plaza disaster.

Sanchita Saxena, Professional Faculty, Center for Responsible Business, Haas School of Business, will serve as discussant. 

Event moderated by Elora Shehabuddin, Professor of Gender & Women’s Studies and Global Studies and Director, Subir and Malini Chowdhury Center for Bangladesh Studies, UC Berkeley

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Event live streamed on FB at: ChowdhuryCenter atUCBerkeley

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About the Speaker

Mohammad Tareq Hasan is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology, University of Dhaka, Bangladesh. He holds a PhD in Social Anthropology from the University of Bergen, Norway. His research interests include minority and ethnic groups, gender relations, collective action, anthropology of work, state formation, political economy, and egalitarianism. He is the author of Everyday Life of Ready-made Garment Kormi in Bangladesh: An Ethnography of Neoliberalism. (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022)

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Established in 2013 with a generous gift from the Subir & Malini Chowdhury Foundation, The Subir & Malini Chowdhury Center for Bangladesh Studies at UC Berkeley champions the study of Bangladesh’s cultures, peoples and history. The first of its kind in the US, the Center’s mission is to create an innovative model combining research, scholarships, the promotion of art and culture, and the building of ties between institutions in Bangladesh and the University of California.

Like us on FACEBOOK

For DIRECTIONS to the Institute please enter “Institute for South Asia Studies” in your google maps or click this GOOGLE MAPS LINK.

PARKING INFORMATION
Please note that parking is not always easily available in Berkeley. Take public transportation if possible or arrive early to secure your spot.

Event is FREE and OPEN to the public.

/live/events/243754-mohammad-tareq-hasan-moral-jeopardies-and-exorcisms-i