The J. Watumull Scholarship for the Study of India provides support for University of Hawai`i undergraduate or graduate students who want to study in India.  For AY 2013-2014, students may compete for awards of up to $5,000 each. Applicants must be U.S. citizens or permanent residents who will be undertaking a pre-approved program of study relating to their degree at a reputable Indian institution.  Undergraduate applicants may choose to participate in the UHM India Study Abroad Program.  The minimum length of study in India will be for two months for all study options.  Applicants should review and fulfill the eligibility criteria. The award must be used by Summer 2014. Students from across the UH System are eligible to apply for support.  Upon their return from the program of study, recipients must submit a written report about their experience, and the academic objectives accomplished.

Please submit the application electronically to csas@hawaii.edu by April 8, 2013.  The application material includes the eligibility and criteria, the list of supporting materials you need to submit, the application form, and three confidential reference forms.  

We have developed additional guidelines for undergraduates interested in the UHM Study Abroad Center’s new India Program.

 Applicants are encouraged to contact the CSAS director, Monisha Das Gupta (dasgupta@hawaii.edu), for questions regarding the application process.

http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/the-great-number-fetish/article4345243.ece

Vandana Shiva has become an iconic figure in the fight against the corporate takeover of agriculture. Her “Raise Awareness, Inspire Change” tour of Hawaiʻi in January will bring attention to two very important issues – seed sovereignty and food sovereignty (or what she calls food freedom or food democracy). Seed sovereignty is the right of farmers to save, use, exchange, and sell their own seeds. Seed sovereignty is seen as an essential requirement for food sovereignty, which is defined as the right of each person, community, and nation to define its own agriculture and food policies and practices that will enable each entity to not just have food security, but also ensure that the food produced is environmentally sustainable, and socially just.

The entry of multinational corporations into agriculture aided by the neoliberal policies of particular nation-states, and the World Trade Organization (WTO) pose the biggest threats to seed and food sovereignty today.   This commodification is dominated by a few agro-food giants through an integration of all aspects of production from seed breeding and research all the way to the food that ends up on our tables. While a handful of big agro-food giants control the market, Monsanto has become a symbol of all that is undemocratic, unsustainable, and inequitable in farming and food.

The fight against Monsanto and genetically modified crops is a just fight, and food and seed sovereignty seems to represent a universal good. However, in any movement there are contradictions. So while there is no question that the taking down of agro-food giants is important, one should also ask who defines seed and food sovereignty, how and, why.   How do these definitions affect those who struggle to eke a living from the land?

One of my most fundamental findings that emerged from my research on the food sovereignty movement in the Telengana region of India in 2008 and 2009 is that the perspectives of those who depend on agriculture, especially those who have to scrape a living from small pieces of land, are vastly different from urban intellectuals and activists who claim to represent these grassroots voices. For example, in the Telengana, a prominent food sovereignty NGO’s promotion of sustainable traditional food crops as a way to achieve food security and control of the food system (food sovereignty) did not resonate with farmers’ bread-and-butter issues and aspirations to move beyond a subsistence livelihood.  Even if the NGO’s prescriptions allowed the farmers to take care of their food needs, they needed enough income to educate their children, pay for medical expenses, to get their daughters married, and participate in an economy that was becoming an increasingly monetized.  By growing subsistence and traditional food crops, they could hardly meet these needs.

Unless farmers are completely isolated from the market and live subsistence livelihoods they cannot but feel pressured to participate in an increasingly monetized economy, and move to commercial crops. Monsanto has been implicated in farmers’ suicides in India because of the sale of GM cotton seeds. But a little known fact is that the suicides started before the introduction of genetically modified cotton in 1997-1998 in Warangal[i] district of Andhra Pradesh. The state created incentives for farmers to grow cotton even in areas that were not suitable for its cultivation. World cotton prices were high, and the promise of high profits encouraged many to move from low-risk to high risk cotton cultivation. When market prices crashed, pests attacked or droughts occurred, then farmers were caught in a downward spiral of dispossession, extreme desperation and suicide. All this happened during a time of shrinking state supports and reduced safety nets for the rural poor with the adoption of neoliberal economic policies. In the Telengana, it is not just cotton farmers who have committed suicide, but those who have been involved in a high risk commercial agriculture, and have nowhere to turn. This implicates the neoliberal model of agriculture more than the work of one corporation.

As far as I can see there are two battles – the one against the likes of Monsanto, and one on the ground that relates directly to ensuring that the rural poor have food and livelihood security. Unfortunately, these two do not always align.  Those who “own” the discourse of food/seed sovereignty need to consider how programs influenced by their ideas play out in specific localities for impoverished farmers, and the particular challenges they face in the shift toward commercial agriculture and high capital input crops. Vandana Shiva and other ideologues in the food/seed sovereignty movement in India have been accused of essentializing and idealizing rural livelihoods, and gender relations[ii]. We need to hear more about what farmers have to say about the multiple pressures they are facing as a result of the entry multi-national corporations, austerity measures imposed by their own governments, shifts in social aspirations and changing climate patterns among other things.   It is up to the movement spokespeople like Vandana Shiva to keep their finger on the pulse of the needs of the rural poor and make seed sovereignty relevant to their struggles.

As those who are working for food security and sovereignty in Hawaiʻi get ready for Vandana Shiva’s tour, I urge you also to keep in mind that the needs of western farmers, and those of Indian farmers –  who still struggle to get their needs for adequate food, healthcare, education met –  are vastly different.  How will the seed and food sovereignty help the poor farmer who is desperate to grow a commercial crop on her land because she needs money? Monsanto is culpable in all sorts of ways.  But let us remember that the quotidian problems of poor farmers in South Asia and in many other developing countries are much larger than what the struggle for seed sovereignty aims to address.

For more information on classes and events, you can contact them at:

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“Sensing South Asia”

Conference Dates: April 17-19, 2013, in Honolulu, Hawai’i

Deadline to submit proposals: January 15th, 2013

What happens when we approach social and natural worlds, the body, and affect through the senses?  How do disciplinary and interdisciplinary understandings of South Asia change if we consider that what and how we feel, hear, taste, smell, touch, see, and intuit are culturally and historically mediated?  The symposium invites scholars, artists, and practitioners to engage with the senses as portals to time, place, and social, cultural, and natural processes in South Asia.  We are particularly interested in research grounded in sensory relations and intersensory modalities that can generate new questions for various disciplines.  In this symposium, we want to explore what South Asian societies — and their histories, philosophies, everyday rituals and practices, and political economies — can offer to emerging theories and methods in sensory studies.  Participants are encouraged to perform or use new media as part of their presentations.

 The presentations could cover topics and themes such as:

• Tactile, olfactory, and aural worlds; noise
• Senses and the everyday
• Sensory deprivation and overload
• Sensory illusions

And, sensory aspects of:

•  Caste
• Asceticism
• Ecstasy
• Anxiety, pain, and trauma
• Memory
• Diasporas and belonging
• Medicine and healing
• Production and consumption
• Technology, film-making, and marketing
• Space, architecture, and design
• Colonialism
• National imaginaries, partition, war, civil unrest, displacement

Our panels will be anchored by keynotes delivered by the following distinguished scholars:

Robert Desjarlais, Anthropology, Sarah Lawrence College, and author of Sensory Biographies: Lives and Deaths among Nepal’s Yolmo Buddhists (University of California, 2003).  He is completing another book entitled, “Subject to Death: Life, Loss, and Mourning among Nepal’s Yolmo Buddhists.”

Uttara Asha Coorlawala, Dance, Ailey School and Barnard College, and is author of “It matters for whom you dance” in Dance Matters: Performing India on Local and Global Stages (Routledge, 2010).  She has published numerous journal articles theorizing embodiment, performance and experience in relation to culture. 

Nayanika Mookherjee, Anthropology, Durham University, author of The Spectral Wound: Sexual Violence and Public Memories and the Bangladesh War of 1971 (Duke University Press, Forthcoming).  She has published extensively in edited collections and in journals on the anthropology of violence, memory, the state and nation, ethics, and aesthetics.

Please send 200-word abstracts for individual papers by email to csas@hawaii.edu. If proposing an entire panel, please also include a paragraph-length rationale and a proposed title for the panel. A limited amount of free lodging will be available to participants.

The J. Watumull Scholarship for the Study of India provides support for University of Hawai`i undergraduate or graduate students who want to study in India. Applicants must be U.S. citizens who will be doing advanced study or research in a pre-approved program of study relating to their degree at a reputable Indian institution.  The CSAS will be awarding one more J. Watumull scholarship of up to $5,000 to a student who wishes to learn about the culture and history of India and its people. The minimum length of study in India will be for two months. The award must be used for Spring 2013 and Summer 2013 travel. Students from across the UH System are eligible to apply for support.  Recipients must submit a written report of their experience and research objectives accomplished upon their return.

Application and more information available at: https://www.hawaii.edu/csas/academics/scholarships/

Applicants are encouraged to contact the csas@hawaii.edu for questions regarding the application process.

In Flesh and Fish Blood Subramanian Shankar breaks new ground in postcolonial studies by exploring the rich potential of vernacular literary expressions. Shankar pushes beyond the postcolonial Anglophone canon and works with Indian literature and film in English, Tamil, and Hindi to present one of the first extended explorations of representations of caste, including a critical consideration of Tamil Dalit (so-called untouchable) literature. Shankar shows how these vernacular materials are often unexpectedly politically progressive and feminist, and provides insight on these oft-overlooked–but nonetheless sophisticated–South Asian cultural spaces. With its calls for renewed attention to translation issues and comparative methods in uncovering disregarded aspects of postcolonial societies, and provocative remarks on humanism and cosmopolitanism, Flesh and Fish Blood opens up new horizons of theoretical possibility for postcolonial studies and cultural analysis.   

In Geography, Associate Professor of Geography, Reece Jones, has published Border Walls: Security and the War on Terror in the United States, India and Israel (Zed Books).  

Two decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall, why are leading democracies like the United States, India, and Israel building massive walls and fences on their borders? Despite predictions of a borderless world through globalization, these three countries alone have built an astonishing combined total of 5,700 kilometers of security barriers. In this groundbreaking work, Reece Jones analyzes how these controversial border security projects were justified in their respective countries, what consequences these physical barriers have on the lives of those living in these newly securitized spaces, and what long-term effects the hardening of political borders will have in these societies and globally.

Border Walls is a bold, important intervention that demonstrates that the exclusion and violence necessary to secure the borders of the modern state often undermine the very ideals of freedom and democracy they are meant to protect.

Christopher de Venecia is a Masters student at the Department of Urban and Regional Planning.  His research interests focus on environmental planning, communtiy-based economic development, and natural resource management.  His J. Watumull scholarship allows him to conduct research this summer and fall on waste-to energy power plants in Assam for his masters thesis. 

Joshua Mandelstam is Ph.D. Candidate in Philosophy. His J. Watumull scholarship allows him to examine Gandhi’s writings in the archives at the Sabarmati ashram and through this research, aim to get a deeper understanding of Gandhi’s action, context, and how by acting in accordance with a larger self, his interactions with others changed. This research will aid his PhD dissertation, the topic of which is how one’s conception of ‘self’ influences one’s moral attitudes and actions generally.