Register to attend the conference HERE!
About the Conference
Waters, flowing, falling or contained as rain, river, tides and wells, have long shaped connections and disconnections across Asia. As they continue to make and remake lives in a world of climate change and economic development, the ‘InterAsia Water(s) Graduate Conference’ at Yale University brings together qualitative and humanistic approaches to the study of water in Asia.
Drawing on, but going beyond, policy-oriented debates on water scarcity and security, this conference aims to bring together rich emerging scholarship on water and waterscapes from different perspectives: biophysical, cultural, historical, and political. We begin with the premise that water is a critical natural resource that sustains and animates life. But we also attend to the myriad ways in which water mediates, reveals, and nurtures social processes such as mobility and immobility, cultural relationships and meanings, as well as political contestations and negotiations.
The conference will draw attention to how past and present waters are created and experienced — and future waters imagined and constructed — in and across Asian and interAsian regions. We move from the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea towards the estuarine creeks and inlets of the Bay of Bengal and intertidal ecologies of the Gulf of Kutch, into the tank-based irrigated fields of Tamil Nadu and the wide floodplains of the Mekong, the Nile and the Ganga, the narrow straits of the Bab el-Mandeb and the Bocca Tigris, the glaciers of the Himalayas and the Pamirs, the drained remnants of the Aral Sea, the piped systems of Yokohama and Mumbai, and other watery spaces.
We invite scholars and practitioners from around the world working across disciplines such as anthropology, art history, environmental studies, geography, history, law, linguistics, literature, philosophy, science and technology studies, sociology, and urban studies. Therefore, the conference will be a pluralistic interdisciplinary platform to examine and appreciate Asian waters in their various forms from a range of angles.
Conference format
The conference will be conducted online over two days on May 28th-29th, 2021 (between 8:30am-1pm ET).
Panels will be grouped thematically by the organizing team. Each panel will comprise three or four 15-minute presentations each. Selected papers will be pre-circulated amongst the finalized panelists and the faculty member from Yale University chairing the panel. An additional 30-45 minutes will be provided per panel for overall comments by the faculty chair and for taking questions and comments from the live audience.
In this way, the conference will not only create a space for interaction between scholars interested in water in Asia, it will also provide emerging and early-career scholars with the opportunity to receive feedback on their work from senior scholars at Yale. The conference will be inaugurated with a keynote talk by a noted scholar, who has made significant contributions to the study of Asian and InterAsian waters, broadly construed.
Note: This conference is generously supported by the Yale InterAsia Initiative and the Councils on South Asian Studies, Southeast Asia Studies, and East Asian Studies at the Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies, Yale University.
