Department of Geography Distinguished Harrison and Eva Bailey Alumni Lecture



Ed Carr is Professor and Director, International Development, Community, and Environment Department and Director, Humanitarian Response and Development Lab (HURDL), George Perkins Marsh Institute, Clark University



Despite considerable aggregate improvements in the human condition over the past century, global development is a persistent site of frustration and disappointment. Its outcomes remain highly uneven and often come up short of expectations, and its thinking appears adrift on a sea of increasingly aged, vague neoliberal ideas. Critical development studies, however, is equally unmoored, lacking a central paradigm around which to interrogate, conceive alternatives to, and therefore challenge and change contemporary development policy and implementation. This talk presents some notes toward a critically-informed global development for the anthropocene in which the rich and the poor, the marginal and the powerful, find their interdependence increasingly obvious. It argues for a agrarian development centered on risk reduction that might catalyze complex and indeterminate changes at the local scale such that broader development goals such as the reduction of hunger might be achieved, and points to the challenges that will emerge from such an effort.

For at least the past decade, debates over the concept of diaspora have chastened its once celebratory invocations. Diaspora once sounded the clarion call for new formulations of space and identity in the social sciences and humanities. Today, its insurrectional cartography has been broken down to the point where diaspora’s evocative spatialities have been lost. The concept now lies bordered by the very boundaries of which it once confronted, and in its most imaginative articulations, strove to transgress. This talk aims to revitalize diaspora’s conceptual promise by turning to four geographies: inter-and trans-regional spaces, diasporic infrastructure, convergences in the city, and homeland-diaspora space frictions. As Dr. Ashutosh discusses with reference to the diversity of South Asian diasporas, these three geographies have the capacity to overturn the contemporary borders that tend to dominate research on migration.



Dr. Ishan Ashutosh is Assistant Professor of Geography at Indiana University-Bloomington. As a critical human geographer, Dr. Ashutosh’s work encompasses the study of migration, the politics of race and ethnicity from an international and comparative perspective, and urban studies. His research examines the multiple and contested representations of South Asia through projects situated at the intersection of migration and area studies. The first research project focuses on the transnational politics of South Asian diasporas in multiple urban centres in the United States and Canada. His second research project examines the constructions of South Asia in the social sciences as a site of knowledge production from within the discipline of geography and as Cold War area studies. Dr. Ashutosh holds a PhD in Geography from Syracuse University, a Master's degree in the Social Sciences from the University of Chicago, and a BA in History from the State University of New York at Buffalo.

The title of their talk is "Walter Benja-memes: Affective Politics in the Age of Viral Reproduction"