Southwest of China?
Identity, borders and conflict in contemporary Asia

This Webinar explored identities, borders and conflict in contemporary Asia through a lens focused on the complex and variegated geopolitical, topological and cultural interface that exists between China and South Asia. Taking the form of a roundtable, the five speakers reflected upon the role of the built environment and infrastructural imagination in constituting this borderland region, and trace out how the contested histories and legacies of the past continues to shape the ways in which this space exists in the present…and are envisaged into the future.

 Speakers

Ruth Gamble is a Lecturer in the Department of Archaeology and History at La Trobe University. She is an environmental and cultural historian of Tibet and the Himalaya. Her first two books, Reincarnation in Tibetan Buddhism; the Third Karmapa and the Invention of a Tradition (Oxford University Press 2018) and Rangjung Dorje, Master of Mahamudra (Shambhala 2020) trace the links between Tibet’s reincarnation lineages and its sacred geography. Her upcoming book Tears of the Gods: Life and Death by the Yarlung Tsangpo in Tibet, is an environmental history of the upper Brahmaputra River. Ruth has authored numerous articles and book chapters on Himalayan sacred, secular and geopolitical environments.

Swargajyoti Gohain is an Assistant Professor of Sociology and Anthropology at Ashoka University. She works on topics of border, state, identity, development and infrastructure in the Indian Himalayan region. Her first book Imagined Geographies in the Indo-Tibetan Borderlands is an ethnography of culture and politics among Tibetan Buddhist communities in Arunachal Pradesh. 

Jabin T. Jacob is Associate Professor in the Department of International Relations & Governance Studies at the Shiv Nadar University, Greater Noida and Adjunct Research Fellow at the National Maritime Foundation, New Delhi. He was formerly Fellow and Assistant Director at the Institute of Chinese Studies, Delhi. Jacob’s research interests include Chinese domestic politics, China-South Asia relations, Sino-Indian border areas, Indian and Chinese worldviews, and centre-province relations in China. Some of his work can be found at https://indiandchina.com/  

Sara Shneiderman is Associate Professor at the University of British Columbia (UBC), in the Department of Anthropology and the Institute of Asian Research at UBC’s School of Public Policy & Global Affairs, where she is Co-Coordinator of the UBC Himalaya Program. She is the author of Rituals of Ethnicity: Thangmi Identities Between Nepal and India (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015) and co-editor of Darjeeling Reconsidered: Histories, Politics, Environments (Oxford University Press, 2018). She is currently Principal Investigator of a SSHRC-funded research partnership, “Expertise, Labour and Mobility in Nepal’s Post-Conflict, Post-Disaster Reconstruction”.

Rupak Shrestha is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Geography at University of Colorado Boulder. Funded by a National Science Foundation’s Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant, his dissertation research, based on twelve months of ethnographic fieldwork, explores how sovereignty is realized, reified, and reimagined as part of everyday life among Tibetan refugees and Ghunsali and Walung indigenous communities in the Nepal/Tibet borderlands. He researches how Nepal’s integration into the BRI poses contradictions to sovereignty and produces new modalities of security and surveillance in Boudha and in the Himalayan borderlands. See also www.rupakshrestha.com

Convenors