Our world is in dire need of repair. From collapsing infrastructures and ecological devastation to fraying democratic institutions and longue durée effects of colonial violence, the language of repair has become ubiquitous to our understanding of continuity and change. Particularly in South Asia—where accelerating crises of neoliberal capitalism intersect with totalizing forms of political power—projects of repair are everywhere. Scholars writing about repair have invited us to consider repair as an ongoing work by which infrastructures are “earned and re-earned” (Jackson 2015) through everyday care, maintenance, and intervention, while they accrete in formations comprising multiple temporalities, histories, and political rationalities (Anand 2015). Infrastructures, by their nature of incompleteness and uneven accretions of social–material relations, constantly call forth projects of maintenance and repair. But what does it mean to repair? Who repairs, under what conditions, and to what ends?

We invite proposals from students at Cornell University, Syracuse University, and University of Rochester for a one-day graduate workshop, organized by the Cornell South Asia Program, to think with repair as an analytic that cuts across social science and humanistic inquiry. We approach repair not simply as a technical solution to breakdown, but as a material and discursive practice deeply embedded in political economy, historical accountability, and struggles over democracy and equality. Thinking expansively, this workshop aims to understand repair as operating across multiple scales and registers. Repair speaks to material concerns—roads, embankments, housing, energy systems, ecosystems—but also to discursive and institutional domains such as postcolonial reckoning and reparation. Repair may signal continuity and stabilization, reproducing existing arrangements under the guise of maintenance. At other moments, it may open possibilities for rupture or refusal. Attending to repair foregrounds the labor, affect, and politics involved in keeping things going, asking when repair may foreground or foreclose certain kinds of prefigurative politics. The workshop aims to create an interdisciplinary space for collective thinking and feedback, welcoming work at all stages—from early conceptual explorations to advanced drafts. Beyond the single-day event, we hope this gathering will foster an ongoing conversation about how repair, as both practice and analytic, can help us critically apprehend contemporary crises and imagine more just futures in and beyond South Asia.

Symposium Schedule

9:00-9:05 Welcome

Sarah Besky (Global Labor and Work, Cornell University)

9:05-10:45 Panel 1: Labor, Environment, and the Politics of (Re)Production

Fruit King, Super Fast: The Politics and Labor of Perishability in Himachal's Apple Economy

Parijat Jha (Anthropology, Cornell University)

Hydromodernity at Her Expense: Gendered Labor and the Politics of Environmental Decline at Manchar Lake

Sarah Hussain (History, Tufts University)

Making Place, Making Livelihood: Ethnic Enclaves as Resistance

Zanaya Hussain (Industrial and Labor Relations, Cornell University)

Strengthening Food Transfers for Maternal Health and Nutrition: Evidence from Rural India

Sumedha Minocha (Applied Economics & Management, Cornell University)

Chair/Discussant: Ashawari Chaudhuri (Science & Technology Studies, Cornell University)

11:00-12:15 Panel 2: State Repair: Technology, Law, and Governance

“Maintenance is our middle name”: Computer Repair Expertise and the Indian State, 1975-91

Jai Vipra (Science & Technology Studies, Cornell University)

“Broken Laws” - India’s Reckoning and Repair of Colonial-Era Legal Statutes

Mohona Ganguly (Public Administration, Syracuse University)

Repairing Indian Education System: Can AI Help in this Process?

Deepak Dennison (Information Science, Cornell University)

Chair/Discussant: Sarah Thompson (Government, Cornell University)

1:15-2:30 Panel 3: Memory, Space, and the Politics of Restoration

Mythological Repair: Babri Demolition, Sacred Labor, and the Architecture of Hindutva

Sara Ather (Architecture, Cornell University)

Tiptoeing Histories: Recuperating the Bagh as a Bagh

Yakin Kinger (Architecture, Cornell University)

Repairing the Colonial Archive: Francis Buchanan-Hamilton’s Botanical Illustrations and the Making of Imperial Knowledge in Nepal

Praagya Khand (Art and Music Histories, Syracuse University)

Chair/Discussant: Ayesha Matthan (History of Art, Cornell University)

This symposium is supported by a grant from the Central New York Humanities Corridor.

Join us for a virtual discussion with Faizah Zakaria, author of The Camphor Tree and the Elephant and winner of the 2025 Benda Prize. This virtual conversation is open to the broader public, and is hosted by GETSEA.

All participants should read the Introduction and Chapter 1.

The Camphor Tree and the Elephant offers a striking rethinking of the Anthropocene in Southeast Asia, tracing how religious transformation, from animism to Islam and Christianity, reshaped human relationships to the environment in the nineteenth-century Sumatran highlands and Malay world. Drawing on ethnography, oral traditions, and colonial archives, Zakaria shows how cosmological change, colonial governance, and plantation economies together produced new ways of imagining and exploiting nature.

The Community Book Read is structured as a live, discussion-based conversation with the author, with Juno Salazar Parreñas as discussant, bringing together faculty and graduate students from across institutions. Coming in with at least some familiarity with the text makes a real difference. Even reading the introduction and first chapter will give you enough to engage meaningfully.

Register here: https://get-sea.org/events/

14Strings! will be performing at Sage Chapel on Sunday, April 26th from 4pm to 6pm!

14Strings! is a Filipino style Rondalla based in Ithaca, New York. The main instruments are 14 stringed plucked instruments like the banduria, the laud (Lute), and the octavina.

14Strings! was originally a student organization at Cornell University, but there is also a community group consisting of non-students and local residents. The two groups regularly practice and perform together. Members include Cornell undergraduate students, graduate students, faculty, and staff as well as Ithaca residents with no Cornell affiliation. Current members come from China, Malaysia, Japan, the USA and (of course) the Philippines.

Join us for a talk by Southeast Asia Program Visiting Scholar, Aung Thura Ko Ko.

This talk will take place at Rockefeller Hall 374, Asian Studies Lounge. Lunch will be served.

For questions, contact seap@cornell.edu.

Abstract: Since the February 2021 military coup in Myanmar, the country has plunged into a deep political, economic, humanitarian, and security crisis. China’s engagement with post-coup Myanmar is multifaceted. While officially adhering to a policy of non-interference, Beijing has pursued a pragmatic approach to safeguard its interests, including investments under the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), border security and access to the Indian Ocean. China has been maintaining ties with both the junta and select ethnic armed groups to ensure leverage across all fronts. Myanmar’s strategic value to China is further heightened by its role as a critical supplier of raw minerals including rare-earth and tin ore, both essential to high-technology and defense manufacturing. China’s cooperation with the military regime has deepened through new mechanisms, including the establishment of a joint security company to protect Chinese investments, as well as the deployment of a ceasefire monitoring team and border operations. At the same time, the China-Myanmar border has emerged as a major hub for cyber scam centers, many operated by transnational criminal networks and protected by regime-aligned border guard forces. China’s strategic intervention in post-coup Myanmar presents a complex mix of geopolitical ambition, economic necessity, and security entanglement. This makes Myanmar a critical case for understanding how Beijing engages with fragile states to advance its regional influence in the Indo-Pacific.

About the Speaker: Aung Thura Ko Ko is a visiting scholar at the Southeast Asia Program (SEAP) for the spring semester. He was previously a research fellow at the Pacific Forum, a U.S. policy think tank based in Honolulu, Hawaiʻi, and an affiliate scholar at the East-West Center from 2024 to 2026. Aung previously worked at the University of Oxford’s Global Security Programme, and his research focuses on wartime and postwar governance, China–Myanmar relations, and Indo-Pacific regional security issues. He has over 15 years of professional experience, including six years with USAID, and has worked with a range of international and local organizations across policy, governance, humanitarian & development assistance, and peacebuilding in Myanmar. Aung has been actively engaged in international advocacy efforts supporting Myanmar’s democracy movement since the 2021 military coup.