All events to take place on Wednesdays from 3:00 p.m. to 4:30 p.m. on York University's Keele Campus
Series Events
Indian Contemporary Dance as Political Movement
Ameera Nimjee (Yale University)
17 September 2025 | Room 280A, Second Floor, York Lanes
Ruins, Airplanes and Aphasia: India in the Soviet Century
Vikrant Dadawala (York University)
08 October 2025 | Room 280A, Second Floor, York Lanes
The Misrecognition of Misrecognition: Caste, Recognition and the Politics of Waste Work in Urban India
Harsha Ananthramam (York University)
19 November 2025 | Room 305, Third Floor, York Lanes
Zain R. Mian (University of Toronto) & Sadhu Binning (Author)
25 March 2025 | Room 280A, Second Floor, York Lanes
South Asia Forum: Demos, Democratization, Democracy
Launched by YCAR in 2020, the South Asia Forum: Demos, Democratization, Democracy lecture series was conceived as a dynamic intellectual space to critically engage with the ongoing erosion of democratic institutions and practices across South Asia. In response to growing concerns around authoritarianism, religious majoritarianism, and shrinking civic freedoms, the series brings together academics, artists, journalists, scholar-activists, senior PhD students and postdoctoral fellows, from both within and beyond York University, said YCAR Director Shubhra Gururani (Anthropology).
In Fall 2022, the series was revitalized to support the South Asia research cluster, with a renewed focus on the political transformations shaping the region. The inaugural lecture, Media and Democracy in India, was delivered by Siddharth Varadarajan, co-founder of The Wire, and one of India’s most respected journalists, on 19 October 2022.
Since then, the Forum has hosted a range of events, including an online panel on political change in Sri Lanka (March 2023), a panel on youth mobilization in Bangladesh (September 2024), and several individual lectures that explore the intersections of democracy, dissent and diaspora.
We are pleased to host speakers working across different regions of South Asia and its diaspora. These include Nadia Hasan’s paper, “Muslim Model Minorities and the Politics of Diasporic Piety,” Mona Bhan’s incisive reflections on Kashmir, Nausheen Anwar’s and Kasia Paprocki’s analyses of climate change in Pakistan and Bangladesh respectively as well as Rukmini Barua’s study of deindustrialization, politics and emotion in South Asia’s steel mills.
“The South Asia Steering Committee continues to envision this series as a space for dialogue and engagement, where scholarship, activism, and artistic inquiry converge to illuminate the complex and evolving landscape of democracy in South Asia,” said Gururani.