The Politics of Lament

Building on an analysis of Gandhari’s lament in the Indian epic, the Mahabharta, this article brings into view those who lament – their bodies, socio-political locations and the political landscapes in which they perform. It argues that reading Gandhari’s lament as a performance allows us to read politics otherwise – at the inter/national and individual levels through paying attention to civilisational tropes and epistemic hierarchies reflecting inequalities of the global order, social and political cleavages based on class, gender and race/caste, as well as resistance to these through the form of lament as cursing. Expanding this reading to the cultural economy of lament also allows us to make visible the social reproduction of communities and the costs of labour of those who perform lament. This reading of lament takes Butler’s argument in new directions: it is the dialectics of grievability and public performance of grieving that together with a cultural economy of lament that makes for the politics of ‘livable life and grieveable death’

Embedded Generations: Family Life and Social Change in Contemporary China

With Embedded Generations, Liu Jieyu offers a comprehensive examination of Chinese family life since the Chinese Communist Revolution of 1949. Grounding her account in the analysis of 260 life history narratives and rich ethnographic data, Liu traces the changing ways families have navigated such experiential milestones as childhood, courtship and marriage, sex and intimacy, and aging over the past seven decades. Using generation, the urban-rural divide, and gender as her analytical lenses, she provides an alternative narrative of Chinese family life, countering the dominant Eurocentric accounts of modernization and family change.Liu proposes the concept of “embedded generations” to capture the ongoing relational and socioeconomic shaping of family life, taking account of variation within and across generations, and of both intergenerational transmission and individual adaptations to changing conditions of everyday life. Resisting the notion that social and family changes are linear historical progressions, Liu reveals a family portrait of complex change, continuity, and diversity. Rather than a straightforward transition from the traditional to the modern and postmodern, she argues, changes in Chinese family life have entailed the adaptation and “re-serving” of traditional ideas and practices to produce a bricolage of modern and traditional elements

The Role and Participation of African Women in Arbitration Report

This Report presents data from empirical research collected from African women who participate in arbitration to answer the question whether there are adequate number of female African arbitrators who actively sit as arbitrators and have the expertise and experience to be appointed onto international arbitration panels

The Wet and the Dry: Climate and the Geographical Imagination in Sri Lanka 1805-1953

This thesis is a study of the spatial history of Sri Lanka and how the idea of a climatically divided island came to dominate the geographical imagination. Partly an empirical study of the history of early climatology in Sri Lanka and partly a study of the development of a geographical concept, it considers how a range of knowledge-making practices in the context of empire led to the production of Sri Lanka’s Wet and Dry Zones in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It traces the production of Sri Lanka’s climatic zones through the documents, correspondence and literary productions of a wide variety of institutions and individuals who came to engage with the island’s climate. At its broadest level, this thesis draws on studies of conceptual history and on scholarship on the construction of natural knowledge. It will show that the emergence and acceptance of Sri Lanka’s climatic zones was contingent on a wide range of social and intellectual developments that took place far beyond the island and outside the immediate fields of climatology and meteorology. At the narrower level, this thesis contributes to studies of the colonial production of environmental knowledge, to recent debates about the position of ‘colonial’ sciences in relation to the broader colonial machinery, and to the emerging body of scholarship that has considered the interrelated histories of empire and climate and the role of climate in the geographical imagination. Throughout, climate is also used as a lens to revisit certain strands of the island’s history that have been subsumed within broader histories of nationalism and the development of the nation state. In so doing, it contributes to scholarship on postcolonial spatial formations in Sri Lanka that seek to look beyond the spatial politics of the civil conflict

Google Guests with Aman Verma. Dr. Mariano Errichiello on Why Parsis Reject Conversion, Lost Rituals, and the Fate of Sky Burials!

Episode DescriptionWell, what more do I need to say? It was a trulyfascinating conversation with Dr. Mariano Errichiello. Hang on—I'll tell you everything we discussed, but first, let me introduce Dr. Errichiello.Born in Naples, Dr. Errichiello is a scholarspecializing in Zoroastrianism, with a focus on its history, rituals, texts, and modern communities. He serves as the Shapoorji Pallonji Lecturer in Zoroastrianism and is the Co-Chair and Executive Director of the ShapoorjiPallonji Institute of Zoroastrian Studies at SOAS University of London. His academic journey includes a BA from the University of Naples, followed by an MAand PhD from SOAS.Before entering academia, he held leadership roles atPwC in Latin America and the UK. His research explores modern Zoroastrian esotericism, funerary practices, and ritual performances among Parsis in India, where he has conducted extensive fieldwork, working with primary sources in Parsi Gujarati.Recognized for his contributions, Dr. Errichiello has received honors from the Ancient India & Iran Trust of Cambridge and the Early Career Prize 2023 from the Association for the Study of Persianate Societies and the Journal of Persianate Studies. He has also held fellowships at the Centre for Comparative Studies of Civilisations and Spiritualities at Fondazione Giorgio Cini and the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies at the University of Copenhagen.For me, it was a privilege to talk with him about awide range of topics. We covered Parsi evolution, rituals, cultural practices, demographics, and why Dokhmenashini (sky burials) is no longer widely practiced. We also discussed why Parsis do not promote conversion. So many fascinating insights came to light

Civilisations: Rise and Fall - Japan

A look at the dramatic collision between Japan’s samurai class and the industrialised west in the mid-19th century, explored through the characters of US naval commander Commodore Matthew Perry, eager to establish a US-Japan trade route; the shogun, the Japanese ruler, aiming to keep his grip on power; and the samurai Saigo Takamori, a Japanese warrior and reformer dedicated to protecting Japan’s independence

Future of the Forest Struggles over Land and Law in India: Podcast with Anand Vaidya

In Future of the Forest: Struggles over Land and Law in India (Cornell UP, 2025), Anand P. Vaidya tells the story of the making and unmaking of India’s Forest Rights Act 2006, a law enacted to secure the largest redistribution of property in independent India by recognising the tenure and use rights of millions of landless forest dwellers.Beginning with the devastating destruction of a north Indian village Vaidya calls Ramnagar, inhabited by landless Dalits and Adivasis, the book follows the interventions of activists, forest dwelling communities, political parties, and corporations during the drafting of the law and traces how each of these coalitions shapes the law’s implementation. Vaidya shows how this ambitious law became a battleground of competing legal potentialities — at once a tool of exclusion, dividing forest dwellers along caste and class lines, and yet a platform for resistance, enabling forest dwellers to challenge State domination.A multi-scalar study, Future of the Forest is attentive to the everyday politics of staking a forest rights claim, revealing how the law opens space for fluid (and often extralegal) interpretations, shifting political authority, and diverging aspirations

Reclaiming Public Space: Statues as Resources for a Queer Political Philosophy

In 1886, a statue of Antinous, beloved of Roman Emperor Hadrian, was installed at University College London for reasons that remain unknown. Building on queer aesthetic theory, I argue that queer statues such as this can be used to transform the public spaces they adorn from sites of violence into venues for the experience of queer ecstasy. This argument builds on the iconoclastic logic of movements like Rhodes Must Fall, which insist that public statutes simultaneously do violence within our public spaces and reflect a violent politics that extends beyond them. Articulating the histories of the statues that adorn our public spaces offers the public political philosopher the opportunity to enliven these statues with an explicitly queer aesthetic capable of inspiring ecstasy among their audience. It also provides the opportunity to critique the politics responsible for eliding this queerness in the first place and making our public spaces so violent for minoritarian subjects. Exemplifying this work, I utilise Saidiya Hartman’s technique of critical fabulation to offer a narrative of Antinous distinct from the imperial rhetoric that traditionally surrounds his image, transforming his presence at University College London into something ecstatic and reclaiming the public space he adorns in the process