Presented by Alex V. Barnard, Assistant Professor of Sociology at New York University (NYU)

Is there an underlying order to how societies classify, treat, and control madness? Both popular and scholarly portrayals of contemporary mental health systems emphasize service fragmentation and inter-professional competition. In this talk, I draw on a year of in-depth fieldwork in France, including observations in a public mental health clinic, social service office, and courts, supplemented with nearly two-hundred interviews with administrators and clinicians, to show the underlying logic to the trajectories of people with serious mental illness through the welfare state. As I show, decision-making across these sites is linked by a shared conception, both embedded in formal policy and informal practices, of what makes someone a malade—a real mentally-ill person. This strong medical and bureaucratic identity ties this population to a paternalist, protective psychiatric system, in sharp contrast to the U.S., where the absence of a clear administrative category for this population leads to a chaotic mix of coercion and care from jails, shelters, and hospitals. While these results reveal the power of the French state to construct a particular definition of what it means to have a serious mental illness, I show how defining the population in this way constrains attempts to reform the system. This talk suggests how the dynamic interplay between categories adopted in official policy, used in professional practice, and adopted by populations themselves can reproduce national differences, even in an era where psychiatric knowledge and medical treatment are converging across national borders.

Speaker

Alex V. Barnard is an assistant professor of sociology at New York University and holds a PhD in sociology from the University of California, Berkeley. His work examines medical and bureaucratic decision-making, welfare policy, and social control comparatively. His previous book, Conservatorship: Inside California's System of Coercion and Care for Mental Illness (Columbia University Press), examines California's involuntary treatment system, showing how a failure of government oversight and inter-agency coordination leads to the extensive use of coercive interventions that provide neither care nor control. Ongoing projects include examining trends in national legislation around involuntary psychiatric treatment, analyzing variation in the policing of protests and university responses to the 2024 student protest encampments, and the governance of emerging addictions to online gambling and AI.

Host
Institute for European Studies, part of the Einaudi Center for International Studies

Co-host
The Department of Sociology Colloquium Series

Talk by Sadia Mahmood, South Asia Program, Cornell University

Mainstream historiography on South Asia has largely overlooked the afterlives of the colonial Enemy Property regime in postcolonial India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. Drawing on archival records from Pakistan and India, as well as oral accounts from the Thar borderlands of Sindh, this talk traces how “enemy property” was produced, contested, and redistributed in early postcolonial South Asia. I situate Pakistan’s practices of seizing and reallocating enemy-owned assets within a longer international legal genealogy that emerged during World Wars I and II, when the confiscation of enemy property became a routine instrument of wartime governance. Transplanted into British India, this legal and administrative apparatus continued to shape Pakistan’s bureaucratic imagination during the 1965 and 1971 Indo-Pak wars. I argue that the category of enemy property migrated from a European imperial wartime technology to a postcolonial mode of governing minorities in South Asia, often blurring the distinction between wartime enemies and religious communities deemed politically suspect. In the Thar borderlands, the ruins of officially classified “enemy properties” function not only as material remnants but also as markers of social and emotional vulnerability through which local populations continue to navigate their dispossession.

Sadia Mahmood is an Assistant Professor at Quaid-e-Azam University, Pakistan, and a Visiting Scholar at the South Asia Program, Cornell University. Her work examines the making of postcolonial religious minorities, the histories of caste-oppressed communities, and state-making in Pakistan. Her research centers on the desert borderlands of Tharparkar, where memories of the 1971 Indo-Pak war continue to shape collective memory and everyday life. She works with Pakistan’s diverse Hindu and Sikh communities in Sindh and Punjab provinces. Her articles have appeared in South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies (2024), where she published “The Long Migration: Revisiting the Postcolonial Minority/Refugee Crisis and Governance in East Pakistan,” and in The Indian Economic & Social History Review (2023), where she published “Untouchability, Caste, and the Electorate: Revisiting Legacies of the Poona Pact in Pakistan.” She also has forthcoming contributions, including “Historical Lines in the Dunes: Tharparkar,” in the Handbook of Sindhi Studies (Routledge).

Talk by Rahul Sagar (Political Science, NYU Abu Dhabi)

Letters to an Indian Raja (1891) was the first work of political theory to be published in modern India. It advised Maharajas to introduce liberal values and constitutional government in the self-governing Native States. Such reform would, it argued, make Indians freer and happier than they were in British India, and thus allow Maharajas to credibly challenge colonial rule. The rediscovery of this long-lost text overturns the long-held belief that Indian liberals merely borrowed their ideas from Britain and were eager to collaborate with the British. On the contrary, it reveals that they sought to make the Native States less vulnerable to both domineering Britons and despotic Maharajas—and that they were the first to discern how difficult it is to uphold liberal values in multicultural societies.

Rahul Sagar is a Global Network Associate Professor at NYU Abu Dhabi. His most recent books include The Progressive Maharaja: Sir Madhava Rao’s Hints on the Art and Science of Government (Oxford University Press, 2022) and To Raise A Fallen People: The Nineteenth-Century Origins of Indian Views on International Politics (Columbia University Press, 2022). He received his BA from Oxford and his PhD from Harvard and has previously served on the faculty at Princeton and NUS.

The Southeast Asia Program’s annual graduate conference offers a space for scholars of Southeast Asia to share new work, receive feedback, and engage with peers and faculty across disciplines.

This year’s special-format conference will feature a mix of panel presentations and individual talks from current SEAP graduate students, creating room for discussion and reflection on emerging scholarship in Southeast Asian studies.

Faculty organizers encourage speakers to explore intersections across their projects as they prepare their presentations. Abstracts and titles from presenters are due January 21, 2026.

Photo contributed by Anna Koshcheeva, from the Buddha Park near Vientiane, Laos.

Join us for a teach-in on how the political legacies of war continue to shape governance, identity, and everyday life in Southeast Asia. The session focuses on Vietnam, Cambodia, Myanmar, and the Philippines, and will be led by student presenters from the collaborating organizations and CDM law professor and human rights educator Dr. Su Yin Htun.

This event is a collaboration between the Asian & Asian American Center, the Cambodian Student Association at Cornell, the Cornell Filipino Student Association, and the Southeast Asia Program.

Dinner from Taste of Thai will be provided. All are welcome. Please RSVP: https://cglink.me/2ee/r2295106

The Cornell Gamelan Ensemble is joined by singer and composer Peni Candra Rini for a concert held in memory of the ensemble’s founder, Marty Hatch, who passed away in August. The program features Rini’s compositions along with some of Hatch’s favorites from the standard repertoire.

Speaker: Dr. Patrick Hällzon, Postdoctoral, Uppsala University, Department of Linguistics

Talk Description: Swedish archives host some of the world’s largest collections of early-20th-century Uyghur material culture and written sources. This consists of manuscripts, printed books, photographs, as well as artifacts including medicine and seed collections. Many of the sources have been digitized and are freely accessible online for the general public. In the presentation I will discuss how I have used these sources in my current research project and what they can tell us about oasis life in Eastern Turkestan before the area became incorporated into the People’s Republic of China under the term Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region.