Cornell-Syracuse Consortium Announce Spring Symposium
This year’s Cornell-Syracuse
South Asia Consortium conference, “Gujarat/ Guatemala: Marketing Care and
Speculating Life,” will be an international symposium on May 6-7, 2016 at
Cornell University. This symposium is being organized by Anindita Banerjee,
Associate Professor of Comparative Literature, and Debra Castillo , Professor
of Comparative Literature, of Cornell University. South Asia Center faculty
members Cecilia Van Hollen, Associate Professor of Anthropology, and Himika
Bhattacharya, Assistant Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies, will
participate as discussants. .PNG)
Through the interconnected
geographies of Gujarat, India, the symbolic epicenter of the burgeoning
surrogacy market, and Guatemala, an iconic source of gendered migration for
childcare work in North America overshadowed by a different futures market –
child laundering via the instruments of international adoption – this symposium
will not just create a dialog across the borders of South Asian and Latin
American area studies and the social sciences, humanities, bioethics, and law.
It will bring together academic participants with activists who have worked
within the care industry.
Instead of taking the widely acknowledged
deterritorialization of both bodies and bodies-in-the-making as the point of
departure, the symposium will center discussions on the interface between the
two locations in order to negotiate the symbolic and material aspects of the
symposium’s subject. For more information about the location and times of the
symposium, please visit the South Asia Program’s website: http://events.cornell.edu/event/gujarat_guatemala_marketing_care_and_speculating_life.