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Seminar Sita Venkateswar, Massey University, New Zealand November 11th, 2009, 17:00, CES Seminar Room Within the Observatory of Risk In this paper, I suggest a vision for Public Anthropology that offers the potential to transcend the limits of our mandate as a merely academic enterprise, challenging us to consider ethical forms of action and intervention within the current global conjuncture. Drawing on my ongoing involvement with the indigenous groups in the Andaman Islands, the paper examines the post tsunami conjuncture in the islands when the postcolonial politics of internal colonization subverted the opportunity for radical transformation in the situation of the indigenous groups of the Andaman Islands. I map a necessarily provisional and contingent topography for such a project, while taking note of some recent developments that can lead to radically altered modes of engagement with government and institutional processes in India. As part of a more just vision of the world, I draw on the work of feminist, political theorist Nancy Fraser for strategies that address the linked imperatives of "recognition, redistribution and representation". I re-visit Chantal Mouffe's call for a radical democracy, as fresh and ever more urgent in the new millennium as the world in its current global conjuncture lurches from one crisis to the next one, to envision a more substantial democratic space. Sita Venkateswar is Senior Lecturer at Massey
University, New Zealand where she joined after completing her PhD in
Cultural Anthropology from Rutgers
University. Since her PhD research in the Andaman Islands, she has
conducted a visual exploration of child labour in Nepal, then
extended her interests to address globalisation, poverty, and
grassroots democracy in Kolkata (formerly Calcutta). She has currently
embarked on new research addressing the situation of refugees and
forced migrants in New Zealand and Europe. |