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. 

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.