TABLE OF CONTENTSLetter from Prime Minister Justin Trudeau

Letter from Premier Kathleen Wayne

Letter from Mayor John Tory

Welcome from the Co-Chairs

What is “Worlding”?

Conference Schedule

Keynote Address

Panel Discussion 1: Remapping Boundaries

Panel Discussion 2: Worlding Beyond Borders

Breakout Workshops

Sponsors

Executive Team

01.

02.

03.

04.

05.

06.

07.

08.

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LETTER FROMPRIME MINISTER TRUDEAU

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March 10, 2017

Dear Friends:

I am delighted to extend my warmest greetings to everyone taking

part in the 2017 Interrogating Notions of Development and

Progress (INDePth) Conference.

This annual event, hosted by the Asian Institute at the University of Toronto, allows

students from various to disciplines to explore complex issues related to economic

and social development, and advance solutions that are consistent with Canada’s

democratic ideals and values. This year’s conference, featuring workshops, panel

discussions and small group sessions, will examine South Asia and its rising

economic and political significance in world affairs.

I would like to commend the organizers of the INDePth conference for putting

together an enriching and insightful program. I am certain that delegates will benefit

from the exchange of ideas while enjoying the camaraderie and social interaction that

are an essential part of the experience.

Please accept my best wishes for success with your deliberations.

Sincerely,

The Rt. Hon. Justin P.J. Trudeau, P.C., M.P.

Prime Minister of Canada

LETTER FROMPREMIER KATHLEEN WAYNE

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LETTER FROMMAYORJOHN TORY

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WELCOME LETTER

Dear Delegates,

Welcome to our 2017 Conference.

Interrogating Notions of Development and Progress (INDePth) is an annual student-run conference affiliated with the Asian Institute at the University of Toronto. For the past five years, INDePth has been a prominent platform for delegates to foster dialogue on Asia through interdisciplinary analysis. For 2017, we are proud to present Worlding South Asia Beyond Borders as the theme for this year’s conference.

While previous conferences have been state-centric, we selected ‘South Asia’ as a regional and discursive frame to engage with critical development studies. In particular, we look at how South Asia is positioned as a ‘third world’, which is configured as a spatial and temporal world that is isolated from the rest of the globe. The hierarchies produced from and within categories such as ‘first,’ ‘third’, ‘developed’, ‘developing’, ‘Western’, ‘Eastern’ fosters differences and disparities. These categories in fact ‘world’ South Asia as a region of backwardness inscribed onto over 1.7 billion bodies. Therefore, we seek to destabilize such divisive labels by using South Asia as site of reflection and re-interpretation. Rather, we envision new worlds engineered by South Asia as a living breathing space that is coherent and complex.

Ultimately, our aim is to host a platform for South Asia as a site of analysis through which frames of development are problematized. We do not claim to ‘know’ the region or speak from a position of authority. We utilize post-colonial theory through a transnational, interdisciplinary and self-reflexive manner. By complicating and disrupting the frames used to study ‘third world’ space, we hope to re-imagine the region and problematize our own knowledge. By doing so, participants will have a chance to utilize our conference as a method within their own respective academic fields and research.

We have been fortunate to enjoy the generous support and guidance of numerous faculty, student clubs, and community organizations throughout various stages of planning. We thank in particular the Asian Institute at the Munk School of Global Affairs in sharing their expertise and resources with INDePth. Their generosity has been instrumental in putting together this year’s conference, and allowing INDePth to continue acting as a forum for enthusiastic individuals committed to learning.

On behalf of the 2017 INDePth executive team and our sponsors, we thank you for your time and invite you to engage with our theme of South Asian Worlds.

Atif Khan & Arnold YungCo-Chairs, INDePth 2017

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WHAT IS “WORLDING”?

Adapted from University of British Columbia, How We Learn Media & Technology’s “Worlding”.

Worlding was first popularized by Heidegger in Being and Time (1927). He turned the noun (world) into the active verb (worlding), a generative process of world making, world becoming and (as he puts it) world “bringing-near.” For Heidegger, worlding is how we experience a world as familiar, a difficult negotiation without a tidy definition. There is not an essentialist, fundamentally superior or universal understanding of worlding that is wholly attainable (i.e., there will always be diverse perspectives and ever more primordial possibilities to consider). Worlding is always already a complex and dynamic assemblage of ever-renewing realities, sensations and perceptions through which we must constantly work our way through (Heidegger, 1971,“The Origin of the Work of Art,” p.45). As such, worlding is the sort of imagination of someone, something, or someplace and its multitude of possibilities in what it is and can be in the world.

Eighty years after Being and Time, worlding has evolved from its Heideggerian. Wordling has been appropriated many times over, signifying: imperialist processes and the colonial inscription of textuality (Spivak, 1985, 1990); everyday feminist international politics (Pettman, 1996); violences of heteropatriarchy and heteronormativity (Fadem, 2005); geopolitical classifications of first, second, third and fourth worlds (OWNO, 2010); globalization (de Beer, 2004); to urban infrastructural projects in Asian cities that move away from universalizing theories and concepts and remaps relationships of power through spatial practices (Roy & Ong, 2011).

In our conference, “Worlding” can be understood as projects and practices that challenge the relations of power between so-called “developing third world” spaces in relation to the “first”, allowing a re-imagination in the global context. We look at various processes of spatial imagining as ways that postcolonial spaces reinvent and challenge existing norms and standards and engage in a process of world making remaking. We use “worlding” as a framework to investigate how processes in what we understand as “South Asia” may disrupt typical conceptualization of fixed bordered space.

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CONFERENCESCHEDULE10:30 am – 11:00 am Registration and informal lunch

11:00 am – 12:00 pm Opening Remarks and Keynote Speech

12:00 pm – 1:15 pm Panel 1: Remapping Boundaries

Topic 1: The Innovation of South Asian CapitalTopic 2: Biopolitics of Poverty: Organ Trading and the Question of ‘Rights’ Topic 3: Breaking the Boundaries of Citizenship

Each topic presentation lasts from 10 - 15 minutes, followed by a 10 - 15 minutes moderated panel discussion

1:15 pm – 2:00 pm Breakout Workshops

Participants will be divided into three rooms:Munk School Room 023N North House – Green Munk School Room 108N North House – RedMunk School Room 208N North House – Purple

2:00 pm – 2:30 pm Coffee Break

2:30 pm – 3:00 pm Music and Dance Performance

3:00 pm – 4:00 pm Panel 2: Worlding Beyond Borders

Topic 4: Acts of “Worlding” Re-appropriatedTopic 5: Beyond South Asia: how can ‘Worlding’ travel beyond borders?

Topic presentations lasts 15 minutes each, followed by a period of moderated panel discussion

4:00 pm – 4:10 pm Closing Remarks

4:10 pm – 6:00 pm Reception and Networking

After 6:00 pm, there will be a Spring Semi Social hosted by CASSU and EASSU. If interested, participants are encouraged to attend

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KEYNOTE ADDRESS

Professor Chandrima Chakraborty is an Associate Professor in the Department of English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University. Her research focuses especially on postcolonial literatures and cultures, diaspora studies, gender studies, trauma and memory studies, Hindi cinema, South Asia, and the South Asian diaspora.

She has worked extensively on examining and publishing works on critical approaches to history, South Asian masculinity, globalization, and identity. Her major work Masculinity, Asceticism, Hinduism: Past and Present Imaginings of India (2011), unravels the strategic reworking of histories and memories in Indian nationalist discourse that makes Hindu asceticism a critical site for performing masculinity. Her edited special issue, “Mapping South Asian Masculinities: Men and Political Crises” in South Asian History and Culture (2014), examines critical historical events in South Asia and the South Asian diaspora,

conceptualizing history as differentiated encounters among bodies, cultures, and nations, through the frame of political crises. Her current ongoing research is on the 1985 Air India bombings and she has published a Feature Section, “Air India Flight 182: A Canadian tragedy?” in TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies (2012).

Her work has appeared in journals such as ARIEL, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, Studies in Canadian Literature, Economic and Political Weekly, Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies, TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies, International Journal of the History of Sport and Postcolonial Text. She is also the recipient of Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada funding for her current research project, The Unfinished Past: Turbans in an Age of Terror, which examines the cultural ramifications of post-9/11 violence against South Asians in North America.

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PANEL 1:REMAPPING BOUNDARIES

Topic 1:The Innovation of South Asian Capital

Topic 2:Biopolitics of Poverty:Organ Trafficking and the Questions of Rights

Topic 3:Breaking the Boundaries of Citizenship

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TOPIC 1:The Innovation of South Asian Capital

Presentation by Kate Fedorova and Moderating by Professor Francis Cody

This topic explores the growing innovation and technological hubs in South Asia through processes of creating special zones such as “science parks”, “electronic cities”, or “genome valleys”. The topic aims to research the different sites of innovation in development in order to examine how these productive spaces are working to project alternate conceptions of South Asia. Rather than typical imaginations of South Asia as a world of factories for western clothing or consumer goods, these new spaces attempt to be productive sites of innovation and creation. Such innovation sites help to imagine South Asia as a site of active production beyond consumer manufacturing and consumption. At the same time, we aim to also problematize the notion that South Asia can only be valued for its ability to contribute to the capitalist neoliberal market system through its manufacturing or this emerging “innovation” market. In these projects of innovation, which aim to world South Asian space into global significance, how are other types of spaces, production or bodies being excluded from this narrative or rendered invisible?

Professor Francis Cody is Associate Professor at the Asian Institute at the University of Toronto and Department of Anthropology at the University of Toronto Mississauga. He has worked prominently on written language and the social dynamics of collective political action in southern India. His research on citizenship, literacy, and social movement politics in rural Tamilnadu was published as a book called The Light of Knowledge (Cornell 2013), winner of the 2014 Edward Sapir Book Prize awarded by the Society for Linguistic Anthropology. His work contributes to the transdisciplinary project of elaborating critical social theories of mass mediation and politics in the postcolonial world.

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TOPIC 2:Biopolitics of Poverty: Organ Trafficking and the Question of Rights

Presentation by Melika Gonelailai & Angela Hou Moderating by Professor Antonela Arhin

South Asia has been regarded as the ‘organs bazaar of the world’. The growing demand for organs and tissues has been matched by the commodification of certain bodies, mainly made up of vulnerable populations. As South Asia has been imagined as a ‘third world space’ in which less value has been placed in comparison to the Western world, what does it mean for organs and tissues from the Global South to be commissioned to move through transnational networks to the Global

North? This very movement of ‘life’ can be conceptualized within the framework of biopolitics not only as a re-imagination of opportunity, but also value through the means of survival for both parties involved – organs for the recipient to live, and money for the donors to live. What we can see from the biopolitics of poverty is the ways in which certain bodies have been constituted to simply exist as ‘modes of production’ that also succumbs them to a set of practices that resides outside the periphery of the state. Thus, what does it mean

to be valuable in relation to what you can produce – body parts, and in relation to how the West needs you, and places their set of values on you? Therefore, as South Asia, becomes a literal ‘space of life’ that both challenges and reinforces the set values placed upon it. Thus, through the transnational nature of this practice, South Asia is placed directly into the capitalist, neoliberal market, in which its value is re-imagined and reconstituted throughout the world.

Professor Antonela Arhin is the Executive Officer and a Sessional Lecturer at the Centre for Diaspora and Transnational Studies at the University of Toronto. She has worked extensively on transnational illicit flows, transnational labour exploitation, child rights and human trafficking and citizenship and identity. She has also had 19 years of professional experience in higher education, government, NGOs and consulting. Her co-edited book Labour Migration, Human Trafficking and Multinational Corporations: The Commodification of Illicit Flows (London and New York: Routledge, 2012) addresses human trafficking for labour exploitation within the contexts of migration and the global economy. Dr. Arhin is the recipient of the 2015-16 Inaugural Sessional Lecturer Superior Teaching Award conferred by the Faculty of Arts & Science at the University of Toronto.

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TOPIC 3:Breaking the Boundaries of Citizenship

Presentation by Arnold Yung and Moderating by Professor Rachel Silvey

Based upon ethnic and civil concepts of nationhood, many scholars assumed that the formation of citizenship in South Asia is based upon how states and institutions define it. This interpretation also emphasizes the guarantee of rights, full political participation and legality as key factors in making a citizen. However, this interpretation neglects a variety of factors. First and foremost, the concept of citizenship, which implies a “duality” of inclusion and exclusion as stated by Hae Yeon Choo, problematizes the positivist message that citizenship is a project to produce full equality. Secondly, as Benedict Anderson’s observed how nation states “produced citizens by constructing commonalities among its members as “imagined communities”, the association of citizenship with nationality is problematic when taking into the ongoing dynamic processes and diversity in South Asia. Thirdly, the assumption of the state as the main producer of citizenship clashes with

dynamic global patterns such as the legacy of colonialism and the ongoing process of globalization. Therefore, how do we define citizenship? To respond to this question, this topic aims to approach citizenship through a decentered approach, removing the state’s role from the classical interpretation of citizenship as the end goal of a project to achieve full equality. Considering the significance of British colonial legacy on the social, cultural and economic attitudes of South Asians both within and abroad, this topic explores Hong Kong’s diverse South Asian community. A strong combination of colonial legacy on state institutions and globalization had shaped and curved the discourses of South Asians in the city. By looking into this unique community, this topic attempts to discuss and rethink what and how ‘citizenship’ means for South Asians, and whether or not there is a commonality to its interpretation.

Professor Rachel Silvey is Associate Professor in the Department of Geography and Planning and Interim Director of the Asian Institute at the University of Toronto. She has worked primarily on critical development studies through her research on the gender dimensions of migration and economic change in Indonesia. She has published widely in the fields of migration studies, cultural and political geography, gender studies, and critical development. Her major funded research projects have focused on migration, gender, social networks, and economic development in Indonesia, Bangladesh, and across South East Asia. Her current work examines Indonesian and Filipino domestic workers’ employment in Singapore and the UAE (US National Science Foundation), and she leads the project on migrant workers’ labour conditions for the SSHRC Partnership Project, “Gender, Migration and the Work of Care: Comparative Perspectives,” led by Professor Ito Peng.

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PANEL 2:WORLDING BEYONDBORDERS

Topic 4:Acts of Worlding Re-appropriated

Topic 5:Beyond South Asia:How Can “Worlding”Travel Beyond Borders?

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TOPIC 4:Acts of Worlding Re-Appropriated

Presentation by Shiao Shiao Chen

“Worlding” and its context largely derives from a state - level of implementation (Aihwa Ong), and it occurs to counter the present narrative of “developing countries” and “third world”. Acts of “Worlding”, though state level, neglects the “worlding” that one should account for through individual subaltern narratives. “Worlding”, while a consistent phenomenon throughout Asian temporalities, suffer from generalization of simply being physically identifiable, from an aerial lens, rather from daily occurrences. “Worlding” on an individual basis is constantly happening and has been a long part of diasporic narratives, although more surfaced now thanks to the internet and this platform should continue to be an outlet for “worlding”.

It is not something that just occurs in the realms and regions that has left the most obvious colonial imprint. Re-appropriating late-capitalism might be the way to go - to be an active network and disseminate post-colonial, critical theory, queer theory as examples. An example of this already happening is on spaces like Tumblr where people actively talk and produce truths that are unstable, but on a constant basis and readiness to challenge. This level of activism is not traditional and un fitting of any historical event we’ve seen before but this should not dismiss its effectiveness and critical place in society as a, one might say, almost replacement to current news media outlets.

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TOPIC 5:Beyond South Asia: How Can ‘Worlding’ Travel Beyond Borders?

Presentation by Eden Lee & Atif Khan

In South Asia, “worlding” has been a method used to reimagine the region spatially and temporally. From the urbanization practices to new technological innovations, practices in contemporary South Asia are demonstrating this process of “worlding” as they borrow, reinterpret, and generate alternative imaginaries of their world and their place in the “global”. This topic will draw from the previous Panel One and bridge out the broader thematic connections of world-making and its contribution to dispelling notions of South Asia as a ‘third world’ space. In doing so, we introduce a rupture into ways of understanding space through typical methods of maps and bordered geographic areas. As these seemingly fixed conceptions of space are rethought in the context of South Asia, “worlding” raises new questions for other methods and discourses of understanding and managing space. “Worlding” methods are now reshaping our thinking beyond the fixity of borders.

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BREAKOUTWORKSHOPS

Throughout today’s conference we have two breakout workshop sessions organized. Run by undergraduate students on the INDePth team, these sessions are a chance for active engagement and participation with conference attendees in an informal setting.

Too often in conferences there is a lack of dialogue as panelists present their topics and views followed by a brief period of formalized Q&A exchange. These sessions aim to break out of this rigid structure and allow a more free and open discussion, questioning, and problematizing of not only the topics presented but general ideas about representation and imaginations of space and the legacy of colonialism embedded in our education, academic fields, and how we understand a rapidly changing world.

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SPONSORS

Special Mentions

Jessica Li

Professors

Professor Rachel SilveyProfessor Dylan Clark

Professor Ritu Birla

The Asian Institute at the Munk School of Global Affairs

Rachel OstepNina Boric

Katherine MacIvor

The Richard Charles Lee Directorship Program, in addition to the Asian Institute

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EXECUTIVE TEAM

Co-Chairs

Arnold Yung Atif Khan

Department of Research and Development

Vice-Chair, Research and DevelopmentEden Lee

Research and Development ExecutivesKate Fedorova

Angela HouMelika Gonlailai

Department of Marketing

Vice-Chair of MarketingKana Shishikura

Marketing ExecutivesAndrew Wiseman

Emaan ThaverMia NguyenNolan Terrell

Duc Minh Pham

Department of Internal Affairs and Finance

Vice-Chair of Internal Affairs and FinanceJay Park

Logistics and Finance ExecutivesAlbee Yan

Arden BurrowsKatherine Wang

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