CALL FOR PAPERS

Beyond the Metropolis. Implications of Urbanisation in Towns and Small Cities
in South Asia

In response to the positive feedback to the workshops held in Berlin in the last two years, the Young South Asia Scholars Meet (Y-SASM) has been established as an annual workshop. The Y-SASM is to take place on a rotational basis at a host university, which this year will be the South Asia Institute at Heidelberg University. The workshop will be held from the 14th -16th June, 2012.

The workshop has the declared aim of providing young scholars working on South Asia with a platform for presenting their own research and interacting with scholars from various disciplines. Thereby, it offers an opportunity to establish research networks across the German-speaking region and beyond.

The thematic focus of the Y-SASM 2012 is concerned with the implications of urbanization in South Asian towns and small cities.

For quite some time now South Asian urban studies have been centred on the role and relevance of megacities. So far, these studies have highlighted the importance of urbanising processes for regional and societal developments in metropolises, but have neglected towns and smaller cities. Megacities like Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, Karachi and Dhaka have hitherto been the focus of scholarly attention even though processes of urbanisation affect a much wider populace than those living in urban agglomerations. Given that a substantial number of city-dwellers in South Asia inhabit medium sized towns and small cities which impact severely on their respective rural hinterlands, analysing these urban environments is crucially important.

Processes of urbanisation provide a nexus for various disciplinary approaches: contributions from fields such as anthropology, sociology, geography, economics, political science, history, literary and cultural studies can enrich our understanding about the manifold ways in which the construction of
urbanism is intimately entangled with the multidimensional societal developments in South Asia.

Thus, this workshop is interested in including papers from various disciplinary backgrounds that can highlight how the urban studies are enriching research on South Asia. Of particular relevance would be contributions pertaining to:
1. Theories and concepts of urbanism
2. Urbanism and infrastructure: Architecture, city-planning, transportation, sanitation, (social) communication
3. Urbanism and economy: Capital, finance, work and labour, industry
4. Urbanism, mobility and migration: Urban-rural continuum
5. Urbanism and social distinction: Class, caste and ethnicity
6. Urbanism and conflicts: Social, economic, ethno-religious (communalism)
7. Urbanism and politics: Polity, governance and administration
8. Urbanism and religion: New sites, patterns and ideologies of worship
9. Urbanism and aspirations: Social change, ‘modernity’ and new patterns of
consumption
10. Knowledge production regarding small cities: historiography, languages (vernacular urbanism), literatures and embodied knowledge

Y-SASM wishes to combine its aim of facilitating lively thematically focused debate with its goal of promoting exchange between young scholars.

Please send your abstracts (400-500 words, indicating the topic of your research) and a short CV to the organizers no later than 31st January 2012. The abstracts will then be reviewed and successful candidates will be contacted by the end of February. Besides paper-presentators, all interested
scholars working on South Asia are cordially invited to participate in the workshop. Lastly, in view of the fact that funding is as yet uncertain, we kindly request our participants and guests to arrange for their own travel and accommodation.

Organisers:
Kai Fürstenberg (South Asia Institute Heidelberg), Rafael Klöber (South Asia Institute Heidelberg), Manju Ludwig (South Asia Institute Heidelberg)