Asian Studies Centre

Book Launch: The Karen and the Gift of Education, by Pia Jolliffe

Richard Williams speaks at the South Asia Seminar on 10 May 2016

Aditya Das and Huw Bowen speak at St Antony's for the launch of Defending British India Against Napoleon: The Foreign Policy of Governor-General Lord Minto, 1807-13

Robert Young speaks at St Antony's on 'Fanon transformed? The new writings' as part of the TORCH series Rethinking the Contemporary

Avishek Ray speaks at the South Asia Seminar on 11 October 2016

Arie Dubnov speaks at the South Asia Seminar on 18.10.2016

Sothy Tep speaks at the Southeast Asia Seminar on 13 Februrary 2017

Jesús Cháirez-Garza speaks at the South Asia Seminar Untouchability in India has been widely understood as the practice of excluding, from social or religious life, people who are believed to be permanently impure. Yet, this vision neglects the different emotions and feelings that untouchability produces in the subjects involved with it. This perspective also fails to grasp how untouchability is played through different bodies and diverse spaces at specific historical contexts. This type of understanding often results in an anachronistic portrayal of untouchability as a pan-Indian millenary phenomenon. To avoid this problematic, this paper analyses the complex nature of untouchability by examining its connections to concepts such as space, emotions and the body. In order to do so, this essay looks at the autobiographical notes of B.R. Ambedkar and his dealings with untouchability. It will be shown that Ambedkar’s remembrances of untouchability were linked through specific spaces, such as hotels or train stations, where people could not determine at first hand his place in the caste hierarchy. Such spatial and emotional indeterminacy, allowed Ambedkar to do three things. First, it allowed him to question how untouchables should feel or behave in spaces where they are not identified as an untouchable. Second, analysing the relationship between untouchability and the spaces associated with this practice, Ambedkar became aware that places like the village facilitated the observance of untouchability as bodies marked as touchable or untouchable. Finally, his dealings with untouchability facilitated Ambedkar’s view of untouchability not only as ritual or religious phenomenon but as a practice aimed at excluding untouchables from specific places associated with power.

Jesús Cháirez-Garza completed an MA in South Asian Studies at El Colegio de México, where he first became interested in the history of untouchability and Dalits in India. He then studied a PhD in History at the University of Cambridge, where his doctoral dissertation focused on the concept of untouchability as a political category and in the political thought of B.R. Ambedkar. Cháirez-Garza then joined the University of Leeds in September 2015 as a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Research Fellow.

Mara Malagodi and Luke McDonagh speak at the South Asia Seminar In this seminar Dr Malagodi and Dr McDonagh examine the Dominion Constitutions of Pakistan and Ireland from a comparative perspective. While the two countries could be described as being dramatically different from one another in some ways - e.g. in terms of geography, size of economy, population size - in fact as countries that gained independence in the 20th century from the British Empire via Dominion status they share some important and under-explored political and constitutional similarities, including: (i) in political terms, the legacy of the British 'Westminster' model of government and its emphasis on executive authority; (ii) in legal terms, the impact on the legal system of the subversion of the terms of the Dominion constitutions in each state, particularly with regard to the role of the judiciary and the status of constituent assemblies; and (iii) in relation to questions of religion and nationalism, the dramatic legacy of partition. By exploring these areas from a comparative perspective Dr Malagodi and Dr McDonagh shine a light on the legal and political challenges of the post-colonial experience in two key states that emerged from the British Empire.

Mara Malagodi is a Lecturer in Law at City University London. Mara joined the City Law School in September 2015. Mara is a comparative constitutional lawyer with a linguistically informed specialism in South Asian law and politics, human rights law, and legal history. She is the author of the monograph Constitutional Nationalism and Legal Exclusion in Nepal (OUP, 2013) and of several articles and book chapters on South Asian constitutional law and legal history. Before joining The City Law School, Mara was a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Law at LSE (2012-2015) and a Senior Teaching Fellow at SOAS (2008-2012). She is a scholar of the Honourable Society of the Middle Temple, which awarded her the Blackstone Entrance Exhibition and the Quatercentenary Scholarship. She was called to the Bar of England and Wales in 2016. Mara has also worked as an external consultant for various UN agencies. Mara holds her Doctorate, MA in South Asia Area Studies, and BA (Hons) in Nepali & Politics from the School of Oriental and African Studies (University of London); Bar Professional Training Course (BPTC) from The City Law School; Graduate Diploma in Law (GDL) from the then College of Law; and BA in International Relations and Diplomacy from the University of Trieste.

Luke McDonagh is a Lecturer in the Law School at The City Law School. He undertakes research primarily in the area of Intellectual Property Law and Constitutional Law. Luke holds a PhD from Queen Mary, University of London (2011), an LL.M from the London School of Economics (LSE) (2006-07) and a B.C.L. degree from NUI, Galway (2002-05). Prior to taking up his position at City in September 2015 he was a Lecturer in the Law School at Cardiff University from 2013-2015 and before that he was LSE Fellow in the Law Department at the London School of Economics (LSE) for 2011-2013. During 2014-15 Luke was a Visiting Scholar at Waseda University Law School, Tokyo, Japan. Luke has published widely in journals including The Modern Law Review, Civil Justice Quarterly and the Journal of Law and Society – and his work has had considerable impact, including being cited in 2014 in a UK House of Commons debate on patent litigation, a UK Law Commission report on patent law, and in an amicus curiae submission to the US Supreme Court in the patent case of Highmark v Allcare (2014).

Dominik M. Müller speaks at the Southeast Asia Seminar. In this talk, Dominik Mueller will present the conceptual framework of a newly established collaborative research project studying "The Bureaucratisation of Islam and its Socio-Legal Dimensions in Southeast Asia". It investigates contemporary dynamics of Islamic bureaucratisation with an analytic focus on the state's exercise of classificatory power and its workings on the micro-level. The project views the bureaucratisation of Islam in Southeast Asia not just as an empirical fact to be examined in singular national contexts, but aims at theorising its underlying patterns from a comparative perspective.

Dominik M. Mueller is Director of the Junior Research Group "The Bureaucratisation of Islam and its Socio-Legal Dimensions in Southeast Asia" at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, funded by the German Research Foundation’s prestigious Emmy Noether Programme. After obtaining his PhD at Goethe-University Frankfurt in 2012, he was a Post-Doctoral Fellow in Political and Legal Anthropology in Frankfurt (2012-2016) and held visiting positions at Stanford University (2013), the University of Brunei Darussalam (2014), St Antony's College, University of Oxford (2015), and the National University of Singapore (2016).