Re-Assembly: Popular Politics, Mediation, and the Grammar of Repair

Presenters

Paul Amar is Professor in the Department of Global Studies and director of the Orfalea Center for Global and International Studies, at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is a political scientist and anthropologist with affiliate appointments in the Departments of Feminist Studies, Political Science, Sociology, Comparative Literature, and the Programs in Middle East Studies, and Latin American and Iberian Studies. His most recent books are Cairo Securitized: Reconceiving Urban Justice and Social Resilience (AU Cairo Press, 2024); and Rio as Method: Collective Resistance for a New Generation (Duke University Press, 2024).

Anjali Arondekar is Peggy and Jack Baskin Foundation Presidential Professor of Feminist Studies, UCSC. She was the founding Director, Center for South Asian Studies, UCSC, 2020-24. Her research engages the comparative poetics and politics of sexuality, caste, and historiography, with a focus on Indian Ocean Studies and South Asia. She is the author of For the Record: On Sexuality and the Colonial Archive in India (Duke University Press, 2009, Orient Blackswan, India, 2010), and Abundance: Sexuality’s History (Duke University Press, 2023, Orient Blackswan, 2023).

Utathya Chattopadhyaya is an Assistant Professor of History at UC Santa Barbara and the author of the forthcoming Ganja Matters: The Pursuits of Cannabis in British India. He teaches South Asian and British imperial history as well as histories of commodities, drugs, and cooperative economics.

Richard Falk is Albert G. Milbank Professor Emeritus of International Law at Princeton University, Chair of Global Law, Queen Mary University London. Falk was UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in Occupied Palestine, 2008-2014. His books include This Endangered Planet (1971); Public Intellectual: The Life of a Citizen Pilgrim published in 2021. He was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2023.

George Flaherty is Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Texas at Austin, where he is also co-director of the Center for Latin American Visual Studies (CLAVIS). The working title of his current book project is “Cross-Border Renaissances: Race and Revolutionary Art between Mexico and Black America.”

Ricado Jacobs is Assistant Professor in the Department of Global Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His research is on the global political economy of urbanisation, ecology, race, indigeneity, agrarian change, and emancipatory alternatives.

Adriana Michele Campos Johnson is Associate Professor and Chair of Comparative Literature at UC-Irvine. She is completing a project on visual infrastructures in Latin America and recently co-edited a volume with Dan Nemser for Social Text entitled Reading for Infrastructure: Worlds Made and Broken. Recent publications include “Infrastructure” (Handbook of Latin American Environmental Aesthetics), “Containment, Carrying, Supply” (Diacritics), “Excess of Visibility/Scarcity of Water” (Discourse), “An Expanse of Water” (Liquid Ecologies in the Arts), “In-São-Paulo-Visible” (Revista Hispanica Moderna), “Visuality as Infrastructure” (Social Text).

Horacio Legras is a Professor at the University of California-Irvine. He is the author of Literature and Subjection: The Economy of Writing and Marginality in Latin America (2008), Culture and Revolution: Violence, Memory and the Making of Modern Mexico (2016) and Cultural Antagonism and The Crisis of Reality in Latin America (2022).

David Lloyd is Distinguished Professor Emeritus at UC Riverside. Recent critical books include Counterpoetics of Modernity: On Irish Poetry and Modernism (2022) and Under Representation: The Racial Regime of Aesthetics (2019). He is working on a book, Rage, Shame, and Dread forthcoming with Seagull Books. Poetry collections include Arc & Sill: Poems 1979-2009 (2012) and The Harm Fields (2022).

Nidhi Mahajan is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her book Moorings: Voyages of Capital across the Indian Ocean (UC Press) is forthcoming in June 2025.

Rahul Mukherjee is Associate Professor of TV and New Media and Graduate Chair of the Department of Cinema & Media Studies at University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of Radiant Infrastructures: Media, Environment, and Cultures of Uncertainty (DUP, 2020) and is completing his second book Unlimited: Aspirational Politics and Mobile Media Distribution (MIT Press, Spring 2026).

Dard Neuman is the Endowed Chair of Classical Indian Music and Associate Professor of Music at UC Santa Cruz. He studies the musical transmission and performance of Hindustani music, and developed the Interactive Digital Transcription and Analysis Platform, a web-based platform for digitally transcribing, analyzing, and learning oral melodic traditions.

Joshua Neves is Associate Professor of Film and Moving Image Studies at Concordia University. Most recently, he co-edited a book titled, In/Convenience: Inhabiting the Logistical Surround (Institute of Network Cultures), and he is currently working on a monograph examining emergent media in the age of the fourth industrial revolution.

Rachel Niehuus is a surgeon-anthropologist at UNC. Her first book, An Archive of Possibilities, leverages race theory to situate DRCongo at the center of world and records practices of healing and repair that have the power to move from global antiblackness toward presents and futures otherwise. Her current project examines touch, disgust, and delirium in surgical ICUs — and the power of affect in medical training more broadly.

Gyanendra Pandey is Arts and Science Distinguished Professor of History and Director of the Interdisciplinary Workshop on Colonial and Postcolonial Studies at Emory University. Pandey’s latest book, Fragments of Family: Men at Home in Colonial and Postcolonial India, is due to appear in 2024. Pandey is currently working on a book on politics and democracy in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, in which India and the USA serve as primary examples.

Camila Pastor is a professor at the History Division of CIDE (Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas) in Mexico City, which she joined after receiving her PhD in sociocultural anthropology from UCLA. Her research in historical anthropology focuses on transnationalism, gender and subalternization in Middle Eastern and Latin American colonial and postcolonial settings.

J. T. Roane is an Assistant Professor of Africana Studies and Geography at Rutgers University and Andrew W. Mellon chair in the Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice. He is the author of Dark Agoras: Insurgent Black Social Life and the Politics of Place (2023).

Sudipta Sen is Professor of History and Middle East/South Asia studies at UC Davis. He is the author of Empire of Free Trade (1998); Distant Sovereignty (2002); Ganges: (2019); Terra Aqua: The Amphibious Lifeworlds of Coastal and Maritime South Asia (coeditor, 2022); and Lawless Subjects: Crime and Punishment in Early British India (forthcoming).

Althea Wasow is a filmmaker and an assistant professor in the Department of Film and Media Studies at UC Santa Barbara. Her work-in-progress monograph, Moving Images/Modern Policing: Silent Cinema and Its Afterlives, analyzes the complicity and resistance between police power and motion pictures in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Moderators

Amy Buono is an Assistant Professor of Art History at Chapman University, specializing in the visual and material cultures of colonial Latin America and the Atlantic world, with particular focus on Brazil. Among her research interests are: Indigenous and Afro-Brazilian cultural practices in a colonial context; museum history/theory; and critical heritage studies.

An architect and architectural historian, Swati Chattopadhyay is Professor in the Department of History of Art and Architecture with an affiliated appointment in Comparative Literature at UCSB. Her most recently published book is Small Spaces: Recasting the Architecture of Empire (Bloomsbury, 2023). She is a founding editor of PLATFORM.

Bishnupriya Ghosh publishes in global media cultures, environmental media, and critical health studies. Her early research includes two monographs, When Borne Across: Literary Cosmopolitics in the Contemporary Indian Novel (Rutgers UP, 2004) and Global Icons: Apertures to the Popular (Duke UP, 2011), while her current research is exemplified by the co-edited volume, The Routledge Companion to Media and Risk (Routledge 2020) and a new monograph, The Virus Touch: Theorizing Epidemic Media (Duke UP, 2023).

Nuha Khoury is an Associate Professor of History of Art and Architecture at the University of California, Santa Barbara. A specialist in the art and architecture of the Islamic world, her research focuses on religious architecture and identity formation in early Islam, architectural epigraphy and urbanism within the frame of inter-Muslim relations, and medieval iconography. Her most recent project focuses on the transformations and connections among modern Lebanese artists of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Bhaskar Sarkar, Professor of Film and Media Studies at UC Santa Barbara, works in the areas of Indian cinema, post/de-colonial media, the global South, cultures of uncertainty, media piracy, financial mediation, and queer subcultures. He is the author of Mourning the Nation: Indian Cinema in the Wake of Partition (Duke, 2009), and the coeditor of the collections Documentary Testimonies (Routledge, 2009), Asian Video Cultures (Duke, 2017), and Routledge Companion to Media and Risk (Routledge, 2020), as well as three journal special issues/dossiers on “The Subaltern and the Popular” (for Postcolonial Studies, 2005), “Indian Documentary Studies” (for BioScope, 2013), and “The Global-Popular” (for Cultural Critique, 2022). Sarkar is currently finishing up his next monograph, Cosmoplastics: Bollywood’s Global Gesture. 

Cristina Venegas is Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies at UC Santa Barbara. She is a media scholar whose research focuses on media history and theory in Latin America. She is currently at work on the book, Julio García Espinosa and the Imperfect Imagination and the documentary feature Mapping Alzheimer’s.

Elisabeth Weber is Professor of German and Comparative Literature at UCSB and a co-convener of the research focus group “Catastrophes. Thinking Shoah and Nakba Together.” She is the author of Kill Boxes: Facing the Legacy of US-Sponsored Torture, Indefinite Detention and Drone Warfare (2017).