SASC Colloquium: Building Solidarity for Racial Justice in Transnational South Asia
What are the challenges and opportunities in organizing for racial justice in South Asian diaspora communities in the United States? What lessons can we draw from historical instances of transnational activism? What are the affinities between racial and caste-based discriminations, and relatedly between race and caste as conceptual categories? This panel discussion brings together perspectives from research and community organizing to reflect on these questions.
RSVP: https://yale.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_9hylfT_eQyiSMy8oyoY54A
Panelists:
Sharmin Hossain (Political Director, Equality Labs)
Sangay Mishra (Assistant Professor of Political Science, Drew University)
Samip Mallick (Executive Director, South Asian American Digital Archive)
Co-moderated by:
Sasha Sabherwal (Ph.D. Candidate, American Studies, Yale University)
Sarah Khan (Assistant Professor of Political Science, Yale University)
•Samip Mallick is the Co-Founder and Executive Director of SAADA, which for the last 12 years has worked to document, preserve, and share stories from the South Asian American community. At a time when the role of immigration in American society is being questioned, SAADA’s work serves as a powerful response to the question of who belongs. Working at the intersection of technology and storytelling, Mallick has degrees in Computer Science and Library and Information Sciences and did graduate work in History at Jawaharlal Nehru University. Prior to his work with SAADA, Mallick was the Director of a Center for Digital Information on South Asia at the University of Chicago Library.
•Sangay Mishra is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Drew University. He specializes in immigrant political incorporation, transnationalism, and racial and ethnic politics. His work engages with the political participation of South Asian immigrants in the United States as well as countries of origin with a particular focus on immigrants from India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. He has also been analyzing the experiences of Muslim American communities with law enforcement agencies. His book, titled Desis Divided: The Political Lives of South Asian Americans was published by the University of Minnesota Press in 2016 and Sage India in 2017. The book was awarded the best book on Asian America (2017) by the American Sociological Association’s section on Asia and Asian America.
•Sharmin Hossain is a Bangladeshi-American Muslim organizer and artist, from Queens, New York. Sharmin is the Political Director at Equality Labs, an Ambedkarite South Asian progressive power-building organization that uses community research, cultural and political organizing, popular education, and digital security to fight the oppressions of caste apartheid, Islamophobia, white supremacy, and religious intolerance. A co-founder of the Bangladeshi Feminist Collective and graduate from CUNY Hunter College, Sharmin is committed to community based arts practice, leadership development, South Asian political history and liberation struggles.