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Center for South Asian Studies, UC Santa Cruz

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Center for South Asian Studies, UC Santa Cruz

Our focus is on economic and social justice.

UCSC’s Center for South Asian Studies promotes and supports the study of India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Tibet, Bhutan, the Maldives, and broader Indian Ocean worlds.

04/24/2026

🗓️ Mark your calendars
The Center for South Asian Studies is excited to celebrate students working on South Asia through:
✨ Graduate Student Fellowships
✨ Communicating Research Undergraduate Award
Whether you’re developing research or thinking about how to share your work beyond the university—through writing, media, or other public-facing forms—these opportunities are for you.
📅 Applications due May 1, 2026
Start thinking, start drafting—we can’t wait to see what you’re working on.
🔗 Learn more:
https://csas.ucsc.edu/2025-26-events/csas-graduate-fellowships-2026/
https://csas.ucsc.edu/undergrad-research-award/

04/06/2026

Join us today for “The Many Lives of Syeda X” with Neha Dixit —a talk that traces a life lived under constant corrosive tension across archives, memory, and storytelling.

What does it mean to reconstruct a life from fragments? And who gets remembered in the first place?

📍 The Red Room, Rachel Carson College
🎙Presented by the Department of Sociology and co-hosted Center for South Asian Studies

04/03/2026

🌿 Welcome to Spring Quarter 🌿
We’re excited to share a new season of events, conversations, and collaborations—from to feminist gatherings to talks on food justice and repatriation, book talks, film screenings, and more.
This quarter brings together scholars, artists, and communities thinking through questions of justice, care, history, and place.
✨ Plus: announcements for our Summer Fellowships (grad + undergrad!)
📬 Full lineup just dropped—check out the newsletter in the link below

03/03/2026

We’re thrilled to be launching the Travelling Film Southasia Festival with three unforgettable films exploring love, land, and life across South Asia. Join us for a screening and lively discussion with Dolly Kikon this Thursday evening!

📅 March 5
⏰ 5–7 PM
📍 Studio C, Communications Building (UCSC)

Bring a friend. Stay for discussion. See you there.

02/19/2026

We are excited to welcome poet and scholar Tsering Wangmo Dhompa for two enriching events at UC Santa Cruz.

Join us Thursday, February 26th from 12-1:30pm in Humanities Room 210 for her talk entitled: “Kyi-dug: “Happiness and Sorrow” of Community Organizations”

Come back Friday, February 27th from 9am-11am in Humanities Room 210 for a guided writing hangout

02/12/2026

Our speaker series picks up again on February 26th 2026 with a discussion and writing hangout with Tsering Wangmo Dhompa – until then, we’re reflecting on some of our tremendous discussions this year. In October, Sociality, Science, and Surveillance: Plantations in the 21st Century, Bengt Karlsson invited us to consider how the plantation continues to structure relations of all forms. How might we rethink the afterlife of the plantation?

Until Soon!

01/26/2026

Join us Thursday, January 29 (10-11:30AM PST) for “Kanji Before and After Mullivaikkal: Resistance Histories of Northern Sri Lanka” with Geetha Sukumaran, a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Feeding City Lab at University of Toronto Scarborough. Her talk situates Mullivaikkal Kanji, rice gruel, within the broader Sri Lankan Tamil culinary tradition and explores how it became a symbol of resistance.

📍 ZOOM | Registration Link
🎙 Hosted by the Center for South Asian Studies

01/21/2026

Poet, translator, and scholar, Geetha Sukumaran, invites us to the communal document of kanji which records histories of deprivation, resilience, and collective endurance in the context of Northern Sri Lanka. We hope you will join us online Thursday, January 29, at 10AM PST for a conversation.

In the meantime, Geetha offers an opportunity to contemplate poems of Returning Home. This excerpt is from “A Journey,” in the collection Then There Were No Witnesses: Poems by Packiyanathan Ahilan Translated from Tamil by Geetha Sukumaran (Mawenzi House Publishers, 2018).

📍 ZOOM | Register Here: https://ucsc.zoom.us/meeting/register/OVsvSA6kRGmNJVKrRqXDnw #/
🎙 Hosted by the Center for South Asian Studies

01/12/2026

✨ We’re excited about our upcoming Winter Quarter events at the Center for South Asian Studies! ✨

From interdisciplinary discussions on Tamil resistance via kanji and Tibetan mutual aid organizing to writing workshops and a film festival, we have a vibrant lineup of events coming up, and we’d love to see you there.

📅 Check out the link in our bio for the full schedule of 2026 Winter Events csas.ucsc.edu/2025-26-events/

12/08/2025

The Center for South Asian Studies at UC Santa Cruz is delighted to announce the release of the Fall 2025 issue of Roadsides — “Foodways”! Co-edited by CSAS faculty director, Dolly Kikon, the open-source, special issue engages with CSAS’s annual theme–”Food, Justice, and Community”–and includes an essay by UCSC Anthropology PhD student, Inditian Latifa, as well as the expertise of CSAS affiliates and collaborators, Sanjay Barbora, Omer Aijazi and Bengt Karlsson, who served on the review board. Congratulations to all of the contributors who are helping us think through the intersections of food infrastructure, care, and community!

🔗 Read the full issue for free here: https://www.roadsides.net/collections/foodways

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