Financial Review Australia publishes article about Visiting Professor Ujjwal Singh: http://readnow.mediamonitors.com.au/Temp/39602/139212726.pdf
9 May
IOSARN/CCS Seminar
Professor Ujjwal Kumar Singh
‘Cat and Mouse’ Games: Hunger Strikes and Political Prisonerhood
WHEN: Wednesday, 9th May, 4.00 – 6.00 PM
WHERE: UTS Building 10 (235 Jones Street, Ultimo), Level 14, Room 201
RSVP: cornelia.betzler@uts.edu.au
Political imprisonment is a useful frame and conceptual tool for a historical and ethnographical exploration of the modern state. The definition of political crime, and by implication, a political prisoner, has always been a matter of contestation. In this paper, an attempt has been made to examine this multilayered and contested terrain by focusing on the ‘hunger strike’ as a mode of resistance and reclamation of the self within totalizing prison regimes. The manner in which hunger strikes are executed and the meanings they offer are varied. Correspondingly, the response of the state is also distinct for each group of prisoners, and different versions of the ‘cat and mouse game’ are played out with different intents, ranging from freeing hunger-striking suffragettes from prison, only to re-incarcerate them, permitting Irish republicans to ‘court death’, the forcible feeding of socialist revolutionaries in India and a conundrum over how to respond to the Gandhian ‘fast’ to purge the nation. Hunger striking prisoners, in some cases, such as the Hindustan Socialist Revolutionary Army prisoners, and more recently Naxalites in India, have focused on changing repressive prison regimes and for a recognition of political prisonerhood; others like Anna Hazare and Irom Sharmila, have, albeit in different ways and to different effects, sought to draw attention to political wrongs, through their individual ‘fasts’.
Professor Ujjwal Kumar Singh is currently ICCR’s Rajiv Gandhi Chair Professor in Contemporary Indian Studies at the University of Technology in Sydney. He is involved in teaching two courses on Global Politics From Above and Below, and, Ideas of Change: Ideologies, Beliefs, Visions, respectively. Professor Singh will be delivering seminars and public lectures during his stay at the UTS campus. A Professor in the Department of Political Science, University of Delhi, Delhi, India, he obtained his Masters degree from Delhi University, and PhD from School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. He was earlier a Fellow at the Centre for Contemporary Studies, Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, Teen Murti Bhavan, New Delhi, and has also taught at Hindu College, Delhi University. He is the author of the books Political Prisoners in India (Oxford University Press, 1998, paperback 2001) and The State, Democracy and Anti-Terror Laws in India (Sage, 2007). He has co-edited Towards Legal Literacy: An Introduction to Law in India (Oxford University Press, 2008) and is the editor of the book Human Rights and Peace: Ideas, Laws, Institution and Movements (Sage, 2009). His articles have appeared in Economic and Political Weekly, Critical Asian Studies, Diogenes, Scienza & Politica, Ethnic Studies Report, Contemporary India and Indian Journal of Human Rights.
24 May
IOSARN Seminar
Anupama Roy
Citizenship’s Globality: ‘simultaneous inhabitation’ or ‘crisis’ in citizenship?
WHEN: Thursday, 24 May, 12.30 – 2.00 PM
WHERE: UTS Building 10 (235 Jones Street, Ultimo), Level 14, Room 201
RSVP:cornelia.betzler@uts.edu.au
The paper pegs itself onto the most recent amendments in the Citizenship Act of India (2003, 2005) which inserted the ‘Overseas Citizen of India (OCI)’ as a separate category of Indian citizens. The OCI, it is argued, may be seen as embodying citizenship’s globality. Globality is postulated as a conjuncture, which is a point of coincidence of several indeterminate tendencies – a point – which may be seen as manifesting a condition of sustained and simmering volatility and liminality. The Citizenship Amendment Acts of 2003 and 2005 constitute a point of coalescence of diverse and dissonant strands in the practice of citizenship in India. In order to understand these dissonances and multiplicity of contested meanings associated with citizenship, the idea of the conjuncture as the volatile and dynamic moment in which the past, present, and future coalesce becomes important. Moreover, since globality represents a specific conjunctural condition which claims to hold out a promise of universality, it is important to identify the areas of tension that this promise generates in specific contexts. The paper, therefore, examines the category of the OCI as a peculiar product of globality, imbued with the promise of transnationality and freedom from spatial constraints that the global condition claims to have brought in, and the tensions that the resultant ‘duality’ of citizenship brings in its wake. More significant, however, is the manner in which dual and transnational citizenship generate anxieties around a ‘crisis in citizenship’, which is expressed differently in specific national locations with corresponding notions of resolution of crisis.
Anupama Roy is Associate Professor at the Centre for Political Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi, India. She obtained her PhD from the State University of New York at Binghamton, USA. She has taught earlier at Panjab University, Chandigarh, was Sir Ratan Tata Fellow at the Institute of Economic Growth, and a Senior Fellow at the Centre for Women’s Development Studies. She has been studying and writing on debates around citizenship. In this context she has been looking at changes in the laws relating to citizenship, shifts in its ideological basis, and the manner in which it has unfolded in practice. She is the author of the books Mapping Citizenship in India (Oxford University Press, 2010), Gendered Citizenship (Orient Longman, 2005) and has co-edited Poverty, Gender and Migration (Sage, 2006). Her research articles have appeared in various journals including Contributions to Indian Sociology, Indian Journal of Gender Studies, Economic and Political Weekly, Critical Asian Studies, Indian Social Science Review and Contemporary India.

