Crossroads in Cultural Studies Conference 14-17th December 2016 Program Index

Invited Speakers and Abstracts
Alison Bashford (Cambridge University), Alison Bashford is the Vere Harmsworth Professor of Imperial and
Naval History, University of Cambridge, and fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge. Her first academic position
was Lecturer in Women’s Studies at the University of Sydney. In Global Population: history, geopolitics and
life on earth (2014), Bashford explores why population and international security histories were connected
over the twentieth century. She has since written, with Joyce E. Chaplin, The New Worlds of Thomas Robert
Malthus: re-reading the principle of population (Princeton, 2016). Long interested in the history of medicolegal
border control, Bashford has recently globalised this project in Quarantine: Local and Global Histories
(ed.).
Abstract:
“Contagious Edges: Disease at Continental and Cultural Limits”
Disease prevention might be a novel field for security studies in its international relations guise, but
medico-legal border control is hardly new. Traces of bio-security’s long political, cultural, local and
international history are everywhere. The starting point for this paper is Sydney’s edge: the old
quarantine station on the cliffs of North Head where thousands of rock inscriptions are the literal
traces of disease security in the past. The Quarantine Project, based at the University of Sydney, has
closely analysed this remarkable material culture assemblage over the last few years. Yet I consider
the limits of cultural analysis here as well (including/mainly my own), which often sidestep difficult
epidemiological facts in favour of predictable critical readings. After many years of thinking about
contagious edges, still the hardest questions remain: What do we do with the fact that drugresistant
tuberculosis (for example) is prevalent in countries to Australia’s north, and not in
Australia itself? What if quarantine worked?
Amita Baviskar (IEG, Delhi), Amita Baviskar is Professor of Sociology at the Institute of Economic Growth,
Delhi. Her research focuses on the cultural politics of environment and development. Her first book In the
Belly of the River: Tribal Conflicts over Development in the Narmada Valley (Oxford University Press)
discussed the struggle for survival by adivasis in central India against a large dam. Her subsequent work
further explores the themes of resource rights, subaltern resistance and cultural identity. More recently,
she has focused on urban environmental politics, especially bourgeois environmentalism and spatial
restructuring in the context of economic liberalization in Delhi. Her latest research examines changing
food practices in western India in relation to the transformation of agrarian environments. Amita Baviskar
has edited Waterlines: The Penguin Book of River Writings (Penguin India); Waterscapes: The Cultural
Politics of a Natural Resource (Permanent Black); Contested Grounds: Essays on Nature, Culture and Power
(Oxford University Press); and Elite and Everyman: The Cultural Politics of the Indian Middle Classes (with
Raka Ray, Routledge). She has taught at the University of Delhi, and has been a visiting scholar at Stanford,
Cornell, Yale, SciencesPo and the University of California at Berkeley. She was awarded the 2005 Malcolm
Adiseshiah Award for Distinguished Contributions to Development Studies, the 2008 VKRV Rao Prize for
Social Science Research, and the 2010 Infosys Prize for Social Sciences.
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