Events
ICGC hosts a variety of events throughout the academic year, and partners with campus and local partners to co-sponsor others.
Featured Series
ICGC Colloquium Series South Asia Seminar Series
All Upcoming Events
John B. Davis Lecture Hall (Lower level, Ruth Stricker Dayton Campus Center), Macalester College
How do ideologies of ascriptive difference structure capitalist economies? How do subjects of such ideologies experience and interpret their own ascribed differences? What forms of collective politics do they articulate? How do their political projects reconstitute the terms of ascription? These are the broad conceptual questions that knit together two of my projects. The first, older project that resulted in the book, The Caste of Merit: Engineering Education in India , is on the social and political lives of alumni of the Indian Institutes of Technology, some of whom were part of the post-1965 wave of professional migration to the United States. A subset of this group -- Tamil Brahmins -- is the population that I’ll be focusing on in this paper. The second, new project is on the social and political lives of Tamil Dalits who worked as the underground labor force in the Kolar Gold Fields, a gold mining company town in South India. While at first glance, these seem to be wholly divergent histories, there is considerable overlap. Both Tamil Brahmins and Tamil Dalits were conscripted into capitalist labor regimes that naturalized caste difference . Conscription into these labor regimes catalyzed mobility across political borders and into new spaces of social stratification. These spaces of labor and life produced novel articulations of caste and class that hinged in part on a sense of relational geographies. They also animated new forms of collective self-representation and claims to post-caste futures. In this paper, I consider these histories together to see what the comparison illuminates about the dialectics of caste ascription and future-making.
537 Heller Hall and Live stream
We are all too aware of the looming environmental and social crises of biodiversity loss, climate change, land-use change, and pollution. It can be challenging to maintain hope, both personally and professionally in the face of the many threats to the planet. In this talk I will review highlights from my 30-year career working in tropical ecosystems. Our projects include work to document rooting depths of different plant life forms, and modeling and field studies of secondary forest succession. These studies illustrate the roots of ecological understanding; in essence, how tropical dry forests are put together—but they do not amount to much if they are unconnected from other fields or potential applications. I will then discuss how we can build interdisciplinary bridges that connect different fields of inquiry and practice. We are living in challenging but exciting times, and forging a new, collaborative science and practice of conservation, restoration, and ecology is one way to cultivate care for our planet.
537 Heller Hall (ICGC) and live stream option
Liza Weinstein (Department of Sociology, Northeastern University) will give a paper as a part of the South Asia Seminar Series.
Heller Hall and livestream
Jules Marzec will give a talk on her current work in the ICGC Spring 2025 Colloquium Series.
537 Heller Hall (ICGC) and live stream option
Lalith Kamath (Centre for Urban Policy & Governance) will give a paper as a part of the South Asia Seminar Series.
537 Heller Hall and livestream
Aditi Ashok will give a talk on her research as a part of the ICGC Spring 2025 Colloquium Series.
Heller Hall and livestream
Mariana Cardenas will give a talk on her current research for the ICGC Spring 2025 Colloquium Series.
537 Heller Hall (ICGC) and live stream option
Janaki Bakhle (Department of History, UC-Berkeley) will give a paper as a part of the South Asia Seminar Series.
537 Heller Hall and livestream option
Emina Bužinkić will present a talk on her research on feminist methodologies and ethics in the pursuit of alternative justice addressing state and social violence against migrants.
537 Heller Hall and livestream
Louis Hanson will present a talk on his current work at the ICGC Spring 2025 Colloquium Series.
537 Heller Hall and livestream
Awa Abdi will present her current work at the ICGC Spring 2025 Colloquium Series.