Contesting Governance Book Launch - A Thousand Tiny Cuts: Mobility and Security across the Bangladesh-India Borderlands

The Contesting Governance Platform invites you to a book launch hosted by author Dr. Sahana Ghosh, Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the National University of Singapore. This event will include a talk about the book from Dr. Sahana Ghosh, followed by an interdisciplinary discussion. 

The book chronicles the slow transformation of a connected region into national borderlands. Drawing on a decade of fieldwork in northern Bangladesh and eastern India, Sahana Ghosh shows the foundational place of gender and sexuality in the making and management of threat in relation to mobility. Rather than focusing solely on border fences and border crossings, she demonstrates that bordering reorders relations of value. The cost of militarization across this ostensibly "friendly" border is devaluation—of agrarian land and crops, of borderland youth undesirable as brides and grooms in their respective national hinterlands, of regional infrastructures now disconnected, and of social and physical geographies disordered by surveillance. Through a textured ethnography of the gendered political economy of mobility across postcolonial borderlands in South Asia, this ambitious book challenges anthropological understandings of the violence of bordering, migration and citizenship, and transnational inequalities that are based on Euro-American borders and security regimes.

The interdisciplinary discussion will be held by Dr. David Henig and Dr. Aditya Kiran Kakati:

• Dr. David Henig is Associate Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Utrecht University. His work explores how people remake their lifeworlds in the wake of dramatic societal ruptures. He has conducted research in multiple fieldsites throughout West Asia and Europe, which has been broadly focused on: conflict and coexistence; violence and memory; Muslim politics, revival and transnational mobility; secularism and sovereignty; postsocialism; charity; informal economies; military waste; waste regimes and sustainability; and everyday diplomacy and geopolitics.
• Dr. Aditya Kiran Kakati has an doctorate in International History from the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva. His PhD thesis was titled Living on the Edge: How encounters with global war (WWII) re-made the Indo-Burma frontiers into bordered-worlds. Aditya’s MA thesis was an ethnographic project titled Eating Ethnic Enclaves: Cultural Encounters in Liminal Spaces of Eating in the Context of Migrations from the Eastern Himalayan Region. The research was on emergence of ethnic cuisine, restaurant and labour cultures, identity politics and socio-cultural relations arising from minority community migration from borderland conflict zones within India.

The discussion will be moderated by Dr. Hayal Akarsu, Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Utrecht University. Her research explores how various imaginations of risk and threat securitize and police different realms of social and natural life. Her research and teaching interests focus on police/policing; security; human-rights; international flows and global governance; law and society; environment; eco-justice; digital cultures and surveillance; science and technology studies; ethnography; Anthropology of the Middle East and Turkey.