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.

Please submit abstracts with a title and under 250 words by Friday, February 27, at https://forms.gle/FVBV3qEjqr8b8RcT8. Contributions may draw from anthropology, history, sociology, political theory, geography, architecture, environmental studies, global development, science and technology studies, or related fields.

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

The Fulbright U.S. Student Program supports U.S. citizens to study, conduct research in any field, or teach English in more than 150 countries. The program is open to graduate students, recent graduates, and young professionals. Undergraduate students who wish to begin the program immediately after graduation are encouraged to start the process in their junior year. Recent graduates are welcome to apply through Cornell.

The Fulbright program at Cornell is administered by the Mario Einaudi Center for International studies. Applicants are supported through all stages of the application and are encouraged to start early by contacting fulbright@einaudi.cornell.edu.

Register for the virtual session.

Can’t attend? Contact fulbright@einaudi.cornell.edu.

The Fulbright U.S. Student Program supports U.S. citizens to study, conduct research in any field, or teach English in more than 150 countries. The program is open to graduate students, recent graduates, and young professionals. Undergraduate students who wish to begin the program immediately after graduation are encouraged to start the process in their junior year. Recent graduates are welcome to apply through Cornell.

The Fulbright program at Cornell is administered by the Mario Einaudi Center for International studies. Applicants are supported through all stages of the application and are encouraged to start early by contacting fulbright@einaudi.cornell.edu.

Register for the virtual session.

Can’t attend? Contact fulbright@einaudi.cornell.edu.

Join Einaudi Center experts for World in Focus Talks on global events in the news and on your mind. Our faculty's research and policy insights put the world in focus.

This year we’re hosting informal campus discussions on many Tuesday afternoons. This week’s topic:

In the United States and around the world, strict immigration enforcement and violence are being wielded as political tools. Recent U.S. actions include surveillance of communities, indiscriminate detainment, and violence against protestors. Despite being framed as necessary for the safety of citizens, these tactics are rooted in histories of slavery, the prison industrial complex, and xenophobia.

Does this type of enforcement infringe on rights? How can we understand current events through the lens of global and historical contexts? Do present-day immigration policies make communities safer?

***

Featured Faculty

Shannon Gleeson (Migrations) | Industrial and Labor RelationsTristan Ivory (EAP, IAD) | International and Comparative LaborJaclyn Kelley-Widmer | LawNatasha Raheja (SAP) | AnthropologyIan Kysel | Law

***

Conversations Matter at Einaudi

This conversation is hosted by the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies and its regional and thematic programs. Find out what's in store for students at Einaudi!