Guest Lecturer: Siddharth Chandra

Siddarth Chandra(Professor and Director, Asian Studies Center, Michigan State University)!

Light refreshments will be offered for in-person attendees.

Event will be live-streamed for remote attendees. Zoom Link Here (Passcode: 149491)

“The events of mass violence and genocide in 1971 in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) and 1965-66 in Indonesia were watershed moments in the histories of South and Southeast Asia respectively. Each set of events precipitated a power transition that had profound and lasting impacts on global, regional, and national politics. While the bulk of the literatures on these two episodes of mass violence and genocide have used the lenses of anthropology, cultural studies, history, political science, or sociology to shed light on them, notably excluded from these literatures are the lenses of demography and geography. The aim of this talk is to use the cases of Bangladesh and Indonesia to provide an overview of how demography, with its emphasis on the composition of populations, and geography, with its emphasis on spatial phenomena, can contribute to our understanding of these horrific events. Using the spatial analysis of census data from the two countries, I demonstrate how demographic and geographic approaches can generate material with which to engage in rich and meaningful conversations with the large earlier literatures from other disciplines, often shedding new light on the events and our understanding of them.”

See more information here