This webinar is a presentation of a collaborative research project that has recently received funding from Independent Research Fund Denmark. Focusing on community-led infrastructure projects, the project investigates how transregional relations play out in the everyday lives and social imaginaries of Dawoodi Bohras residing in the port cities of Mumbai, Dar es Salaam and Dubai. By way of an ethnographically rich analysis of Dawoodi Bohra infrastructural initiatives, CO-OC aims to advance what Engseng Ho has termed ‘thick transregionalism’. Studying the social life of infrastructures of a heterogeneous religious community in three littoral locations, this project will unpack the links within and between Indian Ocean regions. The project positions infrastructures as a novel analytical category for studying the Indian Ocean, and will produce a rare simultaneous multi-sited ethnography of the region.
The core research question of the project is: How do infrastructure projects engineer, assert and transform transregional connections and imaginaries across the Indian Ocean?
The project team consists of four scholars, all affiliated to Aarhus University, Denmark; two associate professors (Uwe Skoda and Thomas Fibiger), and two postdoctoral researchers (Cecil Pallesen and Isha Dubey). All are seasoned fieldworkers within their respective areas of India, East Africa and the Gulf. Dubey, Pallesen and Fibiger are currently carrying out fieldwork in Mumbai, Dar es Salaam and Dubai respectively, while Skoda as the project PI will do field visits to each site later, together with the individual researcher. In each of the three field sites, we follow specific community building projects, such as mosques, schools, hospitals and residential complexes, as well as private development projects where relevant. The outcome of the 4-year project is hopefully one or more books as well as academic journal articles.
Date & Time: June 16, 2022, 10.30 AM PST/1.30 EDT
Zoom registration link: Click here
Participants:
Uwe Skoda (Associate Professor for India and South Asia Studies, Aarhus University)
Uwe Skoda is an Associate Professor for India and South Asia Studies at the Department of Global Studies, Aarhus University. He is the PI of the Constructing the Ocean (CO-OC) project (together with Thomas Fibiger). Currently, he is working on the one hand on visual culture (incl. photography) and on the other hand on themes within the field of political anthropology (incl. transformations of kingship and the state). His recent books include: Bonding with the Lord. Jagannath, Popular Culture and Community Formation (2019, co-edited with Jyotirmaya Tripathy, New Delhi: Bloomsbury). For other publications see his Aarhus University webpage. For details, please click here.
Isha Dubey (Postdoctoral Researcher, Department of Global Studies, Aarhus University)
Isha Dubey is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Global Studies, Aarhus University within the Constructing the Oceans (CO-OC) project. Focusing on Mumbai, her sub-project examines and unpacks the dynamics of the entanglements between the ‘social’ and the ‘material’ dimensions of Bhendi Bazaar and the ways in which the Dawoodi Bohras – its most populous and prominent community – inhabit them. The regional focus of Isha’s research is South Asia with an overarching interest in histories of migration, nationalism, communalism and communal violence, diaspora studies, memory studies and urban history. She graduated with a PhD in history from the School of Culture and Society, Aarhus University in 2017 and was employed at the Swedish South Asian Studies Network (SASNET), Lund University as a postdoctoral fellow and researcher prior to joining her current position at AU. Dr. Dubey has published articles in peer-reviewed journals such as the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society (JRAS), India Review and the Journal of Migration Affairs. She is currently working on two book manuscripts – one based on her doctoral dissertation for Orient Blackswan and another edited volume on the politics of memory in South Asia for Routledge.
Cecil Pallesen (Postdoc and Curator at Moesgaard Museum, Aarhus University)
Cecil Marie Schou Pallesen holds a PhD in Anthroplogy from Aarhus University. She is currently employed as a postdoc and curator at Moesgaard Museum and as a postdoc at Science of Religion, Aarhus University. Pallesen conducted her doctoral fieldwork in Tanzania among various Indian communities and was particularly interested in concepts of belonging and ideas about what it means to be a good citizen. She continues her fieldwork in Tanzania in the CO-OC project and pursues her interest in material culture, citizenship, and migration in her fieldwork in the Bohora communities in Dar es Salaam, Zanzibar, and Moshi.Her recent publications count Making friends and playing the game: the moral economy of bribery among Tanzanian Indians in Journal of Extreme Anthropology and “Holding on and letting go. Tanzanian Indians’ responses to impermanence” in Geismar, Otto and Cameron (eds.): Impermanence. Exploring continuous change across cultures.
Thomas Fibiger (Associate Professor in Arab and Islamic Studies at Aarhus University)
Thomas Fibiger is an associate professor in Arab and Islamic Studies at Aarhus University and co-PI of the CO-OC project. He has worked with the Arab Gulf states since 2003, primarily based on ethnographic fieldwork. His PhD in Anthropology (also Aarhus, 2010) focused on varieties of historicity among different ethnic and religious groups in Bahrain. He has more recently done further research on Shia Muslims in Kuwait, on the Bahraini diaspora in Europe, and on the role of sectarianism in the Arab Gulf region. Thomas has contributed to several academic journals as well as to museum exhibitions (for details, see his Aarhus University webpage). In the CO-OC project he focuses in particular on the Dawoodi Bohras in Dubai, which is the main and largest community in the Gulf region, and which has taken a significant part in the development of this new Indian Port city. See his Aarhus University webpage.