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Ketaki Pant: “Homes of Capital: Merchants across Indian Ocean Gujarat” – November 10, 2015

Muslims of western South Asia were major merchants across the British-controlled Indian Ocean from Durban in South Africa to Rangoon in Burma. This talk focuses on the merchant homes, tangible sites of teak and brick that continue to exist today and offer an alternative archive to studying this history.  Pant reflects on what colonial capitalism in the Indian Ocean looked like from the perspective of these intimate sites and considers the effective dimensions of mercantile subjectivity that produced the flexible persons central to the post-slavery era of indentured labor migration.  

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Coralyn Holmes: “White Men’s Guilt and Black Women’s Pain: Gender, Race, and Embodiment in South Africa’s Reconciliation Process” – November 3, 2015

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) of South Africa was engineered to redress human rights violations perpetrated under apartheid rule.   Yet, in many ways, the reconciliation process did not interrupt the patriarchal and racial orders that were established and maintained by the colonial and apartheid governments. This talk will examine the ways in which embodied race and gender identities have been reproduced in the post-apartheid era and effect the ways in which individual engage  with the project of national reconciliation.  

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Alexis Henshaw: “Why Women Rebel: Understanding Women’s Participation in Armed Rebel Groups” – April 2, 2015

Studies indicating that women as leaders and negotiators have a pacifying effect on interstate conflict stand in contrast to the reality of women’s active involvement in civil conflict through armed rebel groups and insurgencies. Henshaw’s research seeks to provide insight into this apparent paradox by analyzing how and why women become involved in rebel groups, drawing on insights from feminist and international relations theories. The salience of these theories is investigated using data on women’s participation in over 70 armed rebel groups active since 1990, the largest data collection of its kind.  

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Neil Visalvanich: “Asian American Political Candidates: An Experimental View” – April 21, 2015

  As America becomes more diverse, voters have been exposed to an increasingly diverse array of political candidates. This has made the study of the effect of race on minority candidacies more relevant than ever before. Scholars have found that race negatively affects black and Latino political candidates, yet the effect of racial cues on the political candidacies of Asians in America remains unexplored. Visalvanich looks at the unique set of racial-political stereotypes that may afflict Asian political candidates and tests whether Asian candidates have competitive advantage or disadvantage due to their race or due to the fact that they are […]

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