Episodios
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This episode features a conversation about the debates and land disputes surrounding the development of airports in Asia and Africa. As airport construction projects proliferate across the Global South – often seen as a fast-track to development and modernization – new tensions frequently emerge, particularly when it comes to the huge tracts of land required for these new infrastructures. My guests today have a new edited volume on this topic, Contested Airport Land: Social-Spatial Transformation and Environmental Injustice in Asia and Africa, just published by Routledge. That book was co-edited by Irit Ittner, Sneha Sharma, Isaac Khambule, and Hanna Geschewski. Unfortunately, Isaac – a professor of political economy at the University of Johannesburg, South Africa – had an urgent matter arise just before recording, so he was unable to join the conversation. But the other three co-editors were able to proceed with a wonderful conversation. Irit Ittner works as a senior researcher in the Programme Environmental Governance at the German Institute of Development and Sustainability in Bonn. Her research interests include unplanned urbanization, land tenure, social navigation, and processes of transformation in coastal West African and European cities. Sneha Sharma works as a Project Officer at Fairtrade International in Bonn after having conducted research at the University of Bonn (2015–2022). She is also the author of Waste(d) Collectors: Politics of Urban Exclusion in India (2022). Hanna Geschewski is a doctoral researcher in Human Geography at the Chr. Michelsen Institute and the University of Bergen in Norway. Her current research explores the socio-environmental dimensions of prolonged displacement, with a particular focus on agriculture, cultivation, and rural livelihoods of Tibetan refugees in South India. In addition to the co-editors, the episode also features Rose Bridger, who wrote the foreword to the volume. Rose is co-founder of the Map of Airport-related Injustice and Resistance and the Global Anti-Aerotropolis Movement. She is also the author of the book Plane Truth (Pluto Press, 2013). As listeners may know, for the past year, we at IIAS were planning a symposium entitled Aspirational Infrastructure Research: Mobilities, Airports, Place (AIR-MAP), which took place in Seoul on October 24-25. That event explored the aspirations and imaginaries surrounding airport mega-developments across the Global South, which have been relatively less examined compared to similar infrastructures in the Global North. On this episode of The Channel, the four guests touch on many of these themes as they discuss their new book as well as the motivations, ambitions, challenges, and outcomes that massive airport development entails.
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In this episode, Soheb Niazi interviews Laurence Gautier about the history of two Muslim educational institutions – Aligarh Muslim University and Jamia Millia Islamia – and what these reveal about the politics of Muslim identity and the position of Muslims in post-Partition India. That topic is the subject of Gautier’s new book, Between Nation and ‘Community': Muslim Universities and Indian Politics after Partition, published earlier this year by Cambridge University Press. Soheb Niazi was formerly a Research Fellow here at IIAS, and he is currently a Gerda Henkel Postdoctoral Fellow at the Freie Universität, Berlin. Laurence Gautier is a researcher at the Centre de Sciences Humaines, New Delhi. She completed her PhD in History at the University of Cambridge and taught for four years at O.P. Jindal Global University, near Delhi. She writes on Muslim politics, secularism, nation-building, and university politics in post-independence India.
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Thomas Berghuis is a curator and historian of Asian art based in The Netherlands. Berghuis recently curated the exhibition Home and the World in Museum Van Loon, an historical building in the canal district of Amsterdam. In this exhibition, fourteen contemporary artists from all over the world used different spaces of the Van Loon canal house to explore the intricate connections between colonialism and nationalism, past and present. In this episode, Berghuis elaborates on the themes of the exhibition, on its peculiar location, and on the importance of alternative perspectives on how to feel at home in a world beyond the “colonial state” and the “nation-state.” In addition to thanking Thomas Berghuis for this interview, we are grateful to Johan Kuiper and Victor van Drielen at the Museum Van Loon for providing images and soundbites from the exhibition.
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This episode brings together two historians who have recently published biographies of 20th-century Indian radicals. The first guest, Ole Birk Laursen is an historian whose work focuses on anarchism and anti-colonialism from the mid-19th century to the mid-20th century, with a focus on South Asian activists in exile. His first book, Anarchy or Chaos: M. P. T. Acharya and the Indian Struggle for Freedom, was published last year by Hurst & Co. He is currently a Researcher in the Department of History at Lund University, Sweden, where he is working on the history of anarchism and syndicalism in Scandinavia. The second guest, Nico Slate, is a professor in the Department of History at Carnegie Mellon University. His research examines struggles against racism and imperialism in the United States and India. His latest book is The Art of Freedom: Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay and the Making of Modern India, published this year by University of Pittsburgh Press. In each of their new books, Ole and Nico take on big questions of freedom, ideological commitment, anti-colonial activism, and transnational radicalism through deeply-researched portraits of a particular figure. Although covering very different people, both works offer fascinating points of overlap and resonance as well as interesting points of contrast.
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This episode is guest hosted by Liberty Chee, who is currently a visiting researcher here at the International Institute for Asian Studies. While in Leiden, Liberty is working on a book manuscript that examines recruitment and employment agencies in Southeast Asia, their relations to other state and non-state actors, and how these structure the experiences of domestic migrant workers themselves. For this episode of The Channel, Liberty organized a conversation about the ILO Convention on Domestic Work (C189), which is a global norm-setting instrument that formalizes domestic work and serves as an important advocacy tool. To date, only one country in Asia – The Philippines – has ratified the Convention, even though more than half of the world’s domestic workers live and reside in the wider region. Asia is also host to a significant number of migrant domestic workers, both moving within and across regions. In this episode, Liberty interviews two advocates and organizers: Elsa Ramos-Carbone and Jec Sernande. Elsa Ramos-Carbone is a founding member of Samahan ng Mga Manggagawang Pilipino sa Belgium (Association of Philippine Migrant Workers in Belgium). Previously, she was Director of Equality and Youth at the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICTFU), and Senior Specialist for Workers' Activities at the International Labour Organization (ILO), Asia-Pacific Regional Office in Bangkok. Jec Sernande is a migrant domestic worker of 17 years. She is Secretary of the Hong Kong Federation of Asian Domestic Worker Union and Executive Committee Member of the International Domestic Workers Federation. In describing their experiences organizing as workers in and across different contexts, their discussion illuminates key moments, alliances, and discourses which made C189 and its ratification possible.
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Here at IIAS, the upcoming edition of our flagship publication The Newsletter (June 2024, #98) comes out next month, just in time for the ICAS 13 conference in Surabaya, Indonesia. This edition of The Newsletter is meant to engage in various ways with the conference theme, “Crossways of Knowledge.” The special Focus section of this issue presents a collection of articles by authors from the Indigenous Ta-u community of Lanyu Island off the coast of Taiwan. Echoing the theme of maritime connections so central to this iteration of ICAS 13, the authors of The Focus reflect on multiple dimensions of Ta-u life, including traditional practices like fishing and boat-building as well as contemporary challenges posed by tourism, migration, and ecological disruption.
As a teaser for the Indigenous collection in the upcoming issue, we asked two authors – both members of the Ta-u community – to come on the podcast and give our audience a sense of the Ta-u language through its stories and poetry. In this episode, Syaman Lamuran gives a brief introduction before Syaman Rapongan, an elder of the community, offers two recitations: first, some ceremonial words spoken during the Summoning Flying Fish ritual; and second, a poem reflecting the importance of boats and fish to the Ta-u culture. Finally, Syaman Lamuran returns to reflect and translate these recitations into English.
If you'd like to know more about traditional Ta-u culture and contemporary Ta-u lives, be sure to pick up Issue #98 of The Newsletter. In addition to Syaman Lamuran and Syaman Rapongan, we'd also like to thank Eric Clark, Annika Pissin, and Huei-Min Tsai, who co-edited the upcoming Focus section in collaboration with members of the Ta-u community.
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This episode features a conversation about development, state-owned enterprises, and the political economy of resource extractivism, with a special focus on the case of Brazil. Jewellord “Jojo” Nem Singh is an Assistant Professor in International Development at the International Institute of Social Studies in The Hague, part of Erasmus University Rotterdam. In 2020, Jojo was awarded a grant from the European Research Council for the five-year project Green Industrial Policy in the Age of Rare Metals: A Trans-regional Comparison of Growth Strategies in Rare Earths Mining (GRIP-ARM), for which he is also affiliated with us here at IIAS. His new book is Business of the State: Why State Ownership Matters for Resource Governance, forthcoming later this year from Oxford University Press. The book includes analysis of multiple sites, including the case of the State-Owned Enterprise (SEO) Petrogras in Brazil. The guest interviewer, Pietro Erber, worked for Eletrobras for many years and was a consultant for the World Bank and for the World Energy Council. He was also the director of the Brazilian Energy Efficiency Institute and writes for newspapers on economics and energy policy. In their conversation, Jojo and Pietro dive deep into the context of Brazil and its relationship to extraction, State-Owned Enterprises (SEOs), as well as corruption and the Lava Jato scandal in Brazil. In covering these topics, they also explore what it all might reveal about growth strategies for states in Global South more broadly, particularly in an era of decarbonization and the race for cleaner technologies.
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On this episode of The Channel, we’re bringing you a full episode from our friends over at The Chicken-Neck (TCN) Podcast. TCN is Northeast India's first policy-based podcast offering an informed take on culture, language, food, clothes, history, politics, law, policy, and much more. The particular episode we're re-posting features an interview with Aditya Kiran Kakati, who was formerly a Research Fellow here at the International Institute for Asian Studies. Aditya's primary research project concerns the global history of Indo-Myanmar borderlands during and after World War II. Beyond this, as you'll hear in the interview, Aditya has wide-ranging interests, including a personal as well as academic engagement with food and culinary cultures. In this crossover episode, Aditya discusses the diverse cuisines of Northeast India, as well as the heritages, politics, and taboos that food brings to the fore. If you like this episode, subscribe to The Chicken-Neck (TCN) podcast.
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CONTENT WARNING: This episode contains discussion of trauma and sexual violence that some listeners may find difficult.
On this episode, Kate McGregor joins for a discussion of so-called "comfort women" of Indonesia. McGregor's new book is Systemic Silencing: Activism, Memory and Sexual Violence in Indonesia, published in 2023 as part of the Critical Human Rights series at the University of Wisconsin Press. In the 1930s and 1940s, the Japanese military imposed a system of prostitution across East and Southeast Asia. Since the 1990s, survivors of the system, euphemistically called “comfort women,” have sought recognition of and redress for the sexual violence they endured. Systemic Silencing explores this history, its fallout, and ongoing activism of its survivors in the context of Indonesia. Kate McGregor is Professor in Southeast Asian History in the School of Historical and Philosophical Studies at the University of Melbourne. She specializes in Indonesian historiography, with particular interests in memories of violence, the Indonesian military, Islam, identity, and historical international links between Indonesia and the world.
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This episode features a conversation about political geology with Adam Bobbette, who serves as a Lecturer in Political Geology at the University of Glasgow. After studying architecture and landscape at the University of Toronto, Adam earned his PhD in geography from Cambridge. His research examines the intersections between politics and environmental and earth sciences, with a special regional focus on Indonesia. His new book is The Pulse of the Earth, which was published in 2023 by Duke University Press. As many listeners of this podcast already know, the next meeting of our flagship conference, the International Convention of Asia Scholars, or ICAS 13, will take place in Surabaya, Indonesia from July 28th through August 1st, 2024. In the run-up to that conference, we are hoping to familiarize our network with the local Javanese context to enrich the ICAS experience and deepen our engagement with the city. This episode is part of that project. As you’ll hear, Adam’s work offers a unique and transdisciplinary view onto questions of science, imperialism, Indonesian cosmologies, and contemporary politics, all while introducing listeners to geologic features of the Javanese landscape.
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In this episode, Soheb Niazi and Julien Levesque discuss Muslim caste organizations in India. Soheb Niazi is an historian who specializes in the social and economic history of modern India. He is particularly interested in studying the history of non-elite (non-ashrāf) Muslim actors in South Asia to understand the formation of caste and class relations among them. Soheb is currently a Research Fellow at the International Institute for Asian Studies (IIAS). During his stay here in Leiden, he is working on his book manuscript, tentatively titled “Contesting Genealogies: Hierarch and Social Mobility among Muslim Occupational Classes in Colonial North India (1870-1940).” Julien Levesque is a political sociologist whose work focuses on socio-political dynamics in South Asian Muslim societies. His first monograph, published in French in 2022 by the Presses universitaires de Rennes, looks into nationalism and identity construction in Pakistan with a focus on the southern Sindh province. Julien currently serves as a Lecturer & Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute of Asian and Oriental Studies at the University of Zurich in Switzerland. His ongoing work examines caste-based political mobilization among Muslims in India. In today’s conversation, Julien and Soheb talk about their recent collaboration as guest editors of a special section in the journal Contemporary South Asia, entitled “Caste Politics, Minority Representation, and Social Mobility: The Associational Life of Muslim Caste in India.” As guest editors, the two curated the collection and also co-authored its substantial introduction. In the following conversation, we discuss the topic of Muslim caste associations generally, and how these organizations reflect and contest political dynamics within the Muslim community, but also beyond into the broader Indian polity.
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As listeners may know, this year marked the 10th edition of the ICAS Book Prize (IBP). The prize was established in 2003 by our flagship conference, the International Convention of Asia Scholars (ICAS), to recognize outstanding publications in the field of Asian Studies. The award brings wider visibility to the latest and most impressive books, and it has become one of the most prestigious book prizes in the discipline. Since its inception, the IBP competition has expanded in many ways. It now includes various editions in multiple languages, including French, Chinese, German, Spanish and Portuguese, Japanese, and Korean. Beyond books, the English Language Edition also includes Dissertation Awards in both social sciences and humanities categories to recognize the groundbreaking work of recently minted PhDs. The competition now also includes the “Best Article on Global Hong Kong Studies” award. For all editions and prizes, IIAS depends on partner institutions who organize and/or sponsor the competitions. Along with the many colleagues who serve on our reading committees, they make the IBP what it is, and we are grateful for their work. For more information on these sponsors and the full results of the IBP 2023, visit https://icas.asia/winners-ibp-2023 or check out the special supplement booklet included in the most recent edition of The Newsletter: https://www.iias.asia/the-newsletter/newsletter-96-autumn-2023.
On today’s episode, we bring you interviews with the two winners of the English Language Edition: Victoria Lee, who won in the Humanities category, followed by John Lie, who won in the Social Sciences category. Victoria Lee is Assistant Professor of the History of Science and Technology at Ohio University. Her winning book is The Arts of the Microbial World: Fermentation Science in Twentieth-Century Japan, published in 2021 by the University of Chicago Press. John Lie is Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. His winning book is Japan, the Sustainable Society: The Artisinal Ethos, Ordinary Virtues, and Everyday Life in the Age of Limits, published in 2021 by the University of California Press.
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This bonus episode is guest hosted by Cha-Hsuan Liu, an Affiliated Fellow at the International Institute for Asian Studies and the editor of the online collection "Global Health Matters" on IIAS' The Blog. To explore the topic of cultural healing and humanistic approaches to health and wellbeing, Cha-Hsuan is joined by four guests: Aditya Kiran Kakati, An-Bang Yu, Marian Markelo, and Fatima Gay Molina. Aditya is a political historian and anthropologist from India. Beyond his scholarship, he is also a practitioner of Pranic Healing, which is a part of the culture in the region where he grew up. Marian Markelo is a well-known Winti priest with a Surinamese background. She was the face of the exhibition "Ritual Specialists" in many Dutch museums. Fatima Gay Molina is a trained anthropologist and currently works for Adventist Disaster and Relief Agency. Her recent research investigates the cultural practices of healing after disasters. Finally, An-Bang Yu was an associate research fellow at the Institute of Ethnology, Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan. His areas of research include Indigenous psychology and cultural healing, Chinese culture, desire and emotion, the Chinese concept of the person, and the Chinese concept of achievement. In this conversation, Cha-Hsuan and the four guests discuss what is meant by "cultural healing" and how it fits into broader conversations about health, wellbeing, and science.
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This episode features a conversation about poetic traditions in East Africa. Earlier this year, Brill published In This Fragile World: Swahili Poetry of Commitment by Ustadh Mahmoud Mau. Ustadh Mau is a spiritual leader and popular poet from Lamu, Kenya. When he visited the Netherlands in May 2023, a local bookshop in Leiden hosted a reading to launch this new collection of English translations. In this episode, we will be playing some recordings from that event to give listeners a sense of the poems in their original Swahili (see also the audio recordings that supplement the book itself). To guide us through the poems and introduce their broader context, the podcast was pleased to welcome Clarissa Vierke and Annachiara Raia, who served as editors and translators of In This Fragile World. Clarissa Vierke is a professor of Literatures in African Languages at the University of Bayreuth. Her PhD examined the specific poetics of a narrative poetic genre from the Swahili Coast in Eastern Africa. Since then, she has worked on manuscript cultures in Eastern Africa and travelling texts along the East African Coast from Kenya to Mozambique and across the Indian Ocean. Annachiara Raia is a University Lecturer at the Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society (LUCAS). She specializes in African languages and literatures, and her research focuses on the role of texts and performative practices in forging Swahili Islamic networks across Muslim lands of the Indian Ocean and the African continent.
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On October 13, 2023, the International Institute of Asian Studies celebrates its 30th anniversary, and The Newsletter will be releasing a special issue as part of this celebration. More than just a three-decade retrospective, the issue is meant to reflect on the contemporary state of Asian Studies and the role of institutions like IIAS in the discipline's future. As regular readers will know, every edition of The Newsletter includes a special section entitled "The Region," in which partner institutions submit curated collections of short articles meant to highlight ongoing Asian Studies research from different parts of the world. In this episode of the podcast, Paramita Paul (Chief Editor at IIAS) hosts a conversation with representatives of four such partner institutions: (1) ISEAS—Yusof Ishak Institute in Singapore, represented by its Deputy Chief Executive Officer Terence Chong; (2) New York University - Shanghai, represented by Lena Scheen, Assistant Professor of Global China Studies; (3) Seoul National University Asia Center, represented by Hong Kong Research Professor Ilhong Ko; (4) The Asia Institute at the University of Melbourne, represented by Edwin Jurriëns, Associate Professor in Indonesian Studies, as well as Cathy Harper, editor of the Melbourne Asia Review. In their conversation, the colleagues discuss the nature of their work with The Newsletter, the value of academic collaboration, and the possible future of such work in Asian Studies.
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This episode features two colleagues having a discussion about gender in East Asian Religions. The first guest, Jingjing Li, is a University Lecturer in Chinese and Comparative Philosophy at Leiden University. Her primary work examines theories of mind and consciousness across East Asian and Continental traditions, particularly Chinese Wei Shi philosophy and Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology, respectively. The second guest, Yingruo Show, was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Asia Research Institute at the National University of Singapore and now serves as Research Coordinator with the Singapore Chinese Cultural Centre (SCCC). She specializes in the intersection of gender and Chinese Buddhist practice. Earlier this summer, Jingjing and Yingruo led an international workshop here in Leiden entitled “Re-staging the Periphery as the Center: Women Communities in East Asian Religions.” The interdisciplinary event was organized by the Leiden University Center for Intercultural Philosophy (LUCIP) with the support of the International Institute for Asian Studies (IIAS). The workshop also received generous funding from the Leiden University Fund and the Dutch Research Council (NWO)’s Veni programme. In the following conversation, Jingjing and Yingruo discuss the event as well as the special issue of the journal Religions that they co-edited earlier in the year. In the course of our discussion, they touch on a variety of topics, including canonical religious texts, lay and monastic practices in East Asia, philosophies of mind, and how all of these are both challenged and invigorated through an interdisciplinary analysis of gender.
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This episode features a conversation between Sally Anne Param and Paul Gnanaselvam. Sally, who serves as the guest host, is a sociologist who has conducted research about the Indian community in Malaysia. Paul Gnanaselvam is an Ipoh-born writer and poet whose work often focuses on the experiences, issues, and identity conflicts of those in the Indian diaspora. His latest collection, The Elephant Trophy and Other Stories was published by Penguin Random House SEA in 2021. Sally recently wrote a review of the collection for the IIAS book reviews platform, which led her to contact Paul himself, who graciously agreed to an interview. In addition to his writing, Paul lectures at Universiti Teknologi MARA (Perak Campus) in Malaysia. As you’ll hear, his fiction is deeply concerned with social scientific questions about marginalization, belonging, social hierarchy, exclusion, and identity, all of which are explored in this episode as well.
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Hedwig Waters is a cultural and economic anthropologist with research interests in topics of debt, wildlife, and moral economic transitions in Mongolia. She currently works as a Horizon Europe ERA Postdoctoral Fellow at Palacky University in the Czech Republic. Earlier this month, her first book – Moral Economic Transitions in the Mongolian Borderlands: A Proportional Share – was published by University College London Press as part of their series “Economic Exposures in Asia.” Since the 1990s, Mongolia's transition to a market democracy has shifted the economic, political, and cultural landscape of the country. The book examines "Magtaal," a pseudonym for the rural township on the Chinese border in which Waters conducted her fieldwork. Through a careful ethnography, the book links the broader transformation of Mongolia to local borderland lives, especially with respect to debt and wildlife. In this episode of the podcast, Hedwig discusses her ethnographic research, her theoretical intervention within economic anthropology, and the process of shaping such work into her new book.
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This episode features a conversation hosted by Aarti Kawlra, the Academic Director of the Humanities Across Borders program here at IIAS, in which she speaks with three guests: Daan van Dartel, Curator of Popular Culture and Fashion at the National Museum of World Cultures in the Netherlands; Lipika Bansal, a researcher, social designer, and the founder of Textiel Factorij in Amsterdam; and, finally, Kirit Chitara, an artist based in India. In September 2022, IIAS and Humanities Across Borders hosted an In Situ Graduate School entitled Textiles and Dyes as Transnational, Global Knowledge. As Aarti and others collaborated on this event with various textile-related institutions, she met this group and heard the story of Kirit, who had previously found the artwork of his grandfather hanging in the Tropenmuseum in Amsterdam. This raised all sorts of perennial questions about power in the production and display of art, and in this conversation, the groups discusses such issues of provenance and attribution, of curation and collaboration.
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Sanderien Verstappen is Assistant Professor of anthropology at the University of Vienna. In addition to her writing, she is also a filmmaker and the founding director of the Vienna Visual Anthropology Lab. Sanderien’s latest book is New Lives in Anand: Building a Muslim Hub in Western India, published last year by University of Washington Press. In 2002, when widespread anti-Muslim violence broke out across Gujarat, India, the town of Anand was perceived as something of a safe haven. Against this historical backdrop, the book ethnographically explores contemporary Anand. In the decades since 2002, the town became a hub for Muslims at multiple scales – an aspirational destination for rural villagers, a regional center in western India, and a place linked to diasporic sites abroad. In this episode, Sanderien discusses her multifaceted work in Anand, touching on themes of transnationalism, place-making, and multi-sited ethnography.
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