Keynote Lecture on Friday
Eleana Kim
(Professor / Anthropology and Asian American Studies, UC Irvine)
Eleana Kim is a sociocultural anthropologist and Professor of Anthropology and Asian American Studies at University of California, Irvine. She specializes in kinship, human/nonhuman ecologies, migration, and the senses, with a regional focus on contemporary South Korea. She is the author of two award-winning books, Adopted Territory: Transnational Korean Adoption and the Politics of Belonging (2010) and Making Peace with Nature: Ecological Encounters Along the Korean DMZ (2022), both of which were published by Duke University Press. She is also the co-editor, with environmental historians David Fedman and Albert Park, of Forces of Nature: New Perspectives on Korean Environments (Cornell University Press, 2023). She teaches courses on anthropological theory, kinship, migration, transnational Korea, and the senses.
“Transpacific Ecologies of War“
From nuclear test sites, to atomic bombs, to land mines, to napalm, Asia and the Pacific have a long history of serving as the testing grounds and proving grounds for militarized technologies of war. Multiple ecologically and psychically toxic ecologies link geographies across the Pacific as well as between Asia and the U.S. This talk focuses on the Korean Demilitarized Zone as a transpacific ecology of war to offer an inter-referencing approach (borrowing from Kuan-Hsing Chen’s Asia as Method), that can decenter conventional geopolitical relations and planetary imaginaries.
Keynote Lecture on Saturday
(Professor / Association for Asian Studies (AAS) President / GWS and Global Studies. Director, Global Studies; Director, Chowdhury Center for Bangladesh Studies, UC Berkeley)
Elora Shehabuddin is Professor of Gender & Women’s Studies, Director of Global Studies, and Director of the Subir and Malini Chowdhury Center for Bangladesh Studies at UC Berkeley. Her last book, Sisters in the Mirror: A History of Muslim Women and the Global Politics of Feminism was selected as a 2022 Choice Outstanding Academic Title by the American Library Association and awarded the 2023 Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy Book Prize from the Association for Asian Studies. She currently serves as co-editor of the Journal of Bangladesh Studies (Brill), on the editorial board of the Cambridge University Press book series, “Muslim South Asia,” and as President of the Association for Asian Studies.
“Red Schoolgirls: Cultivating a Global Radical Imagination in Mid-20th-Century South Asia”
This talk examines the early lives and political projects of young women activists in 1930s–40s Sylhet who were drawn to join the Communist Party. Among them was Hena (Dutt) Das, whose decades of activism would culminate in her helping to found the Bangladesh Mahila Parishad, the largest women’s organization in the country, after Bangladesh’s independence in 1971. I focus on the revolutionary education and motivations that first brought Hena Dutt and her teenage classmates to the Communist Party, how they understood and inhabited communism in their daily lives, and how their personal and political histories complicate ideas about religious and national belonging, about the much-described tug between communism and feminism, and about the relationship between the personal and the political.