FGSS Graduate Workshop:
Archival Activism: Reclaiming histories of radicalism

Friday, February 10
12 pm – 1 pm
190 Rockefeller Hall

Drawing from her experience as a historian of anti-caste radicalism and in curating a finding aid for the archive of Dr. BR Ambedkar at Columbia University, Prof. Anupama Rao will lead a workshop on techniques and principles of archival activism.

Attendees are kindly requested to read “Ambedkar in the Archive” in advance of the workshop.

RSVP for the workshop here.

This graduate student event is sponsored by the Feminist, Gender, & Sexuality Studies Program.

Talk by Kamila Shamsie (Novelist)

Kamila Shamsie will read from her new novel Best of Friends. The novel required Shamsie to return in her imagination to her 15-year-old self who lived through a pivotal moment in Pakistan’s history (the death of the dictator, Zia-ul-Haq, followed by the election of a 35-year-old woman, Benazir Bhutto, as Prime Minister). She will discuss how writing fiction about history can lay bare some of the fictions built around history, while also casting surprising shadows on the present.

Kamila Shamsie is the author of eight novels, including Burnt Shadows, Best of Friends, and Home Fire, which won the Women’s Prize for Fiction and was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, a Vice-President of the Royal Society of Literature in the UK, she was one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists, and her novels have been translated into more than 30 languages. She grew up in Karachi, lives in London, and is a Belknap Visiting Fellow at Princeton University for Spring 2023.

Books will be available for sale and signing from Buffalo Street Books after the reading.

The Rabindranath Tagore Lecture Series in Modern Indian Literature is made possible by a gift from the late Cornell Professor Emeritus Narahari Umanath Prabhu and his wife, Sumi Prabhu. Inspired by Rabindranath Tagore’s expansive imagination, unbounded by geopolitical boundaries, the series has regularly featured prominent writers from across South Asia and its diasporas.

Talk by Amina Yaqin (Associate Professor in World Literatures and Publishing, University of Exeter)

In this talk, I look back at the literary history of feminism in Urdu poetry through the voices of selected twentieth-century women poets. The aim is not to establish a canon of feminist poetry but to trace how voice and form were deployed by a range of poets, from Ada Jafri to Fahmida Riaz, to develop a new feminist aesthetic shaped by secular and sacred sensibilities. Their aesthetic is in dialogue with rekhti, the ghazal, the nazm, and a hybrid Islamicate culture across time and space, establishing agencies of protest, activism, and radical writing. Using an interdisciplinary methodology, I explore how the performative writings of Fahmida Riaz and Kishwar Naheed draw on their participation in community and civic life, shaping ideas of self and subjectivity beyond the personal.

Amina Yaqin is an Associate Professor of World Literatures and Publishing at the University of Exeter. Her major publications include Gender, Sexuality, and Feminism in Pakistani Urdu writing, Framing Muslims: stereotyping and representation after 9/11 (co-authored with Peter Morey), and the co-edited Contesting Islamophobia: Anti-Muslim Prejudice in Media, Culture and Politics. She has published widely in peer-reviewed journals. She has been a co-investigator on two externally funded research projects, Framing Muslims and Muslims, Trust and Cultural Dialogue, with multiple outputs, including edited books, special journal issues, policy briefings, and documentary films. Yaqin’s commentary and interviews have been aired by the BBC, SkyNews, EuroNews, TRT World, Indus News, and Pakistan Television Network. She has written for The National UAE, The Times Higher Education UK, the Daily Pioneer, the British Film Institute, and The Conversation.

Talk by Curt Gambetta (Architecture, Cornell University)

Beginning in the late 1940s, scientists, building professionals, and technocrats embraced cement-stabilized mud (also known as “soil-cement”) as an easy-to-use, economical alternative to pukka concrete and fired brick house construction in India. But for those who made use of it, stabilized mud was more than the mere sum of its technical advantages; rather, it was a technology of the self. Echoing debates about the “choice of techniques” in development economics, engineers, scientists, and other critics of state-led development in the 1970s asserted their ability to choose building techniques that they deemed appropriate to rural India rather than accept the industry-centered imperatives of centralized development planning. At the same time, they hedged that labor-intensive technologies such as stabilized mud would induce self-reliance among rural populations by incorporating underemployed individuals into a wage economy while providing them with low-cost building materials for housing. However, though intended for rural builders, stabilized mud gained traction only by the 1980s and 1990s, as upwardly mobile middle-class house builders in cities sought to build a house of their own. The lecture will approach this history through the activities of scientists associated with ASTRA (Application of Science and Technology to Rural Areas), an erstwhile research cell at the Indian Institute of Science founded in 1974. Through oral history and ethnographic observation of stabilized mud training workshops organized by ASTRA alumni in Bengaluru, it will show how liberalization-era institutions and ideologies of self-reliance recast technological choice as constitutive of a risk-bearing subject.

Curt Gambetta is a historian, designer, and Visiting Critic in the School of Architecture, Art, and Planning at Cornell University. His approach to architectural history is interdisciplinary, bringing historical research about material worlds into conversation with ethnographic fieldwork about their making, wasting, and reuse. He is currently completing his Ph.D. in the History and Theory of Architecture and Urbanism at Princeton University. Titled Mold House, Mud House, Marble House: a cultural history of substitution in late colonial and postcolonial India, his dissertation concentrates on practices of material substitution in housing and their changing socio-political milieu, ranging from swadeshi to Import Substitution Industrialization and liberalization era ideologies of consumer choice and value addition in global markets. Prior to teaching at Cornell, he was the Peter Reyner Banham Fellow at the University at Buffalo-SUNY, a teaching fellow at Woodbury University in Los Angeles, and a resident of the Sarai program of the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS) in Delhi, where he was involved in several initiatives in new media and urban studies. He is a senior editor of Attention audio journal and co-edited a 2012 issue of Seminar about street life and politics in Indian cities.

Get involved with the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies and the Language Resource Center to enhance your language skills!

Through resources on campus, students of all levels can improve global language skills, apply for funding to practice language abroad, and more.

Opportunities include:

Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) FellowshipRare and Distinctive (RAD) Language FellowshipForeign Language Introduction Program (FLIP)Conversation HoursLearn more about student information sessions from the Einaudi Center on minors, funding opportunities, Fulbright, summer language programs, and much more.

Over 500 Cornellians have crossed the globe with the Fulbright U.S. Student Program since the 1940s. You could be the next!

The program, administered by the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies, supports college graduates conducting research or teaching English in more than 150 countries. The Einaudi Center's Fulbright advisor helps you get started early to submit a successful application.

Learn more about student information sessions from the Einaudi Center on minors, funding opportunities, Fulbright, summer language programs, and much more.

Over 500 Cornellians have crossed the globe with the Fulbright U.S. Student Program since the 1940s. You could be the next!

The program, administered by the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies, supports college graduates conducting research or teaching English in more than 150 countries. The Einaudi Center's Fulbright advisor helps you get started early to submit a successful application.

Learn more about student information sessions from the Einaudi Center on minors, funding opportunities, Fulbright, summer language programs, and much more.

Learn more about Fulbright opportunities for graduate students that fund your international research or teaching from a Fulbright advisor at Cornell.

Fulbright at Cornell is administered by the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies. The Einaudi Center's Fulbright advisor works with you to create and submit a competitive application for the Fulbright U.S. Student Program or the Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad program.

Learn more about student information sessions from the Einaudi Center on minors, funding opportunities, Fulbright, summer language programs, and much more.