For the inaugural INET South Asia YSI conference in the U.S., our key theme is the political economy of contemporary South Asia. At the core of these transformations are the fraught and so-called “truncated transition,” where South Asian societies are not making the transition from farm to factory, but the rise of informal economies, industrial clusters, in-between agrarian-urban and peri-urban spaces force us to rethink familiar transition narratives and to eschew them in favor of more grounded theories. These are processes that are enabled in various complex ways by populist politics, both progressive and conservative. We propose the following themes for our 2-day workshop:

• Dialectics of Globalism and Nationalism

• Inequality and Populism

• Agriculture and Urban Crises

• Data and Social Justice

Downloadable PDF of the Program

Agenda

Friday, October 13, 2023

08:30 AM - 09:00 AM | Registration

09:00 AM - 09:15 AM | Inaugural Session

09:15 AM - 10:45 AM | Panel I: Dialectics of Globalism and Nationalism

• Chair: Munis Faruqui, Associate Professor in the Department of South and Southeast Asian Studies, UC Berkeley
• Speakers:
  • Anush Kapadia, Associate Professor, Humanities and Social Sciences, IIT Bombay
  • David Grewal, Professor of Law, UC Berkeley School of Law
  • Katharina Pistor, Edwin B. Parker Professor of Comparative Law, Columbia Law School

10:45 AM to 11 AM | Coffee

11:00 AM - 12:30 PM | Panel II: Agrarian-urban Crises

• Chair: Vamsi Vakulabharanam, Associate Professor of Economics, University of Massachusetts Amherst
• Speakers:
  • Sai Balakrishnan, Associate Professor of City and Regional Planning, UC Berkeley
  • Sharad Chari, Associate Professor, Berkeley Geography, UC Berkeley
  • Thomas Blom Hansen, Reliance-Dhirubhai Ambani Professor in South Asian Studies and Professor in Anthropology, Stanford University

12:30 PM to 1:30 PM | Lunch

1:30 PM to 2:30 PM | Young Scholars Session I: Migrants, Capital and Capitalism

• Chair: Jay Pocklington, Director, Young Scholars Initiative, Institute for New Economic Thinking
• Discussant: Arindam Dutta, Professor, Professor of Architectural Theory and History, MIT
• Speakers:
  • Pratim Ghosal, DPhil candidate in International Development, University of Oxford
    • “From Diamonds to Real Estate: Saurashtra Patels and Socially Embedded Capital in a Transforming City”
  • Ayan Meer, Doctoral candidate in the International Development Group at the Department of Urban Studies and Planning, MIT
    • “Migrant Capitalism: International Emigration and the Political Economy of Urbanization in Punjab”

2:30 PM to 2:45 PM | Coffee

2:45 PM to 3:45 PM | Young Scholars Session II: Dispossessions

• Chair: Sattwick Dey Biswas, coordinator, History of Economic Thought Working Group, Young Scholars Initiative, Institute for New Economic Thinking
• Discussant: Sai Balakrishnan, Associate Professor of City and Regional Planning, UC Berkeley
• Speakers:
  • Danish Khan, Assistant professor in the Economics Department at Franklin & Marshall College
    • “‘Agrarian-Urban Frontier’ and Real-Estate Development: Rethinking ‘Accumulation by Dispossession’ in the Postcolonial Punjab, Pakistan”
  • Gajendran V:, Post-Doctoral Fellow, IIT Hydrabad
    • “Variegated Dispossession: Varieties and Modalities of Dispossession in Chennai’s Ennore, India”

3:45 PM to 4:00 PM | Coffee

4:00 PM to 5:30 PM

Pranab Bardhan, Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Economics, UC Berkeley: Reflections on Indian Political Economy

Followed by Roundtable with

• Paul Pierson, John Gross Endowed Chair, Professor of Political Science, UC Berkeley
• Steven Vogel, Director of the Political Economy Program, the Il Han New Professor of Asian Studies, and a Professor of Political Science and Political Economy

7:00 PM | Dinner at Faculty Club (by invitation only)

Saturday, October 14, 2023

09:00 AM - 10:30 AM | Panel III: Inequality and Populism

• Chair: Sai Balakrishnan, Associate Professor of City and Regional Planning, UC Berkeley
• Speakers:
  • Arindam Dutta, Professor, Professor of Architectural Theory and History, MIT
  • Jayati Ghosh, Professor of Economics, University of Massachusetts Amherst
  • Vamsi Vakulabharanam, Associate Professor of Economics, University of Massachusetts Amherst

10:30 AM to 10: 45 AM | Coffee

10:45 AM - Noon | Panel IV: Data and Democracy

• Chair: Pia Malaney, INET Senior Economist and Director of the Center for Innovation, Growth, and Society
• Speakers:
  • Sripad Motiram, Associate Professor, University of Massachusetts, Boston
  • Gilles Verniers, Amherst College and Centre for Policy Research (CPR), Delhi

Noon - 1:00 PM | Lunch

1:00 PM – 2:15 PM | Young Scholars Session III: Inequality and Crises

• Chair: Arun Balachandran, Postdoctoral Research Scientist, Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University
• Discussant: Vamsi Vakulabharanam, Associate Professor of Economics, University of Massachusetts Amherst
• Speakers:
  • Saswata Guha Thakurata, Assistant Professor, Kanchrapara College, West Bengal, India
    • “Crisis, Inequality and Populism: Analyzing the Relationship between Changing Sources of Growth and Distributional Dynamics” (co-authored with Manikantha Nataraj)
  • Snigdha Kumar, PhD candidate, University of Minnesota
    • “Banking on/with Data: Decoding the Platformization of Banking in India”

2:15 PM to 2:30 PM | Coffee

2:30 PM to 3:45 PM | Young Scholars Session IV: Inequality and Space

• Chair: Jay Pocklington, Director, Young Scholars Initiative, Institute for New Economic Thinking
• Discussant: Katharina Pistor, Edwin B. Parker Professor of Comparative Law, Columbia Law School
• Speakers:
  • Zahra Khalid, PhD Candidate in Geography, City University of New York
    • “Aspiring to secure: the political economy of real-estate development in Karachi, in a time of sea-level rise”
  • Leilah Vevaina, Assistant Professor of Anthropology, The Chinese University of Hong Kong
    • “Immortality and Inequality: The Trust and the ‘Unincorporate Body’”

3:45 AM to 4:00 PM | Coffee

4:00 PM to 5:00 PM | Looking Ahead (Closed)

• Moderators:
  • Sunanda Nair-Bidkar, Director of Strategic Planning, South Asia, the Institute for New Economic Thinking
  • Jay Pocklington, Director, Young Scholars Initiative, Institute for New Economic Thinking

Organizing Team

• Sai Balakrishnan (University of California, Berkeley)
• Vamsi Vakulabharanam (University of Massachusetts Amherst)
• Arun Balachandran (University of Maryland Maryland/Columbia University)
• Sattwick Dey Biswas (Institute of Public Policy, National Law School of India University, India)
• Sunanda Nair-Bidkar (Institute for New Economic Thinking, New York)
• Jay Pocklington (Institute for New Economic Thinking’s Young Scholars Initiative, New York)
• Heske van Doornen (Institute for New Economic Thinking’s Young Scholars Initiative, New York)