BOOK TALK | ONLINE
FRIDAY, April 19, 2024
12:00 – 1:00 PM ET
Join the Zolberg Institute and Dr. Sahana Ghosh online on Friday, April 19 for a conversation about her book, A Thousand Tiny Cuts: Mobility and Security Across the Bangladesh-India Borderlands. Dr. Ghosh’s first book, A Thousand Tiny Cuts chronicles the slow transformation of a connected region into national borderlands and shows the foundational place of gender and sexuality in the meaning and management of threat and security in relation to mobility. This book recasts a singular focus on border fences and migrants as border-crossers and shows, instead, that postcolonial bordering materializes through multiple forms of violence and devaluation in agrarian, borderland lives.
Watch the discussion
About the Book
A Thousand Tiny Cuts chronicles the slow transformation of a connected region into national borderlands. Drawing on a decade of fieldwork in northern Bangladesh and eastern India, Sahana Ghosh shows the foundational place of gender and sexuality in the making and management of threat in relation to mobility. Rather than focusing solely on border fences and border crossings, she demonstrates that bordering reorders relations of value. The cost of militarization across this ostensibly “friendly” border is devaluation—of agrarian land and crops, of borderland youth undesirable as brides and grooms in their respective national hinterlands, of regional infrastructures now disconnected, and of social and physical geographies disordered by surveillance. Through a textured ethnography of the gendered political economy of mobility across postcolonial borderlands in South Asia, this ambitious book challenges anthropological understandings of the violence of bordering, migration and citizenship, and transnational inequalities that are based on Euro-American borders and security regimes.
SPeakers
Dr. Sahana Ghosh
Author; Assistant Professor, National University of Singapore
Dr. Sahana Ghosh is a social anthropologist, broadly interested in forms and experiences of inequality produced through the intersection of mobility, policing, and gender in our contemporary world. She uses ethnography and feminist approaches to study a range of concerns, such as: borders and borderlands, the mobility of people and goods, citizenship, refuge and neighborliness, the national security state, agrarian change, spatial history, transnational kinship, and the political economy of gendered labor. Dr. Ghosh conducts research in India and Bangladesh.
Dr. Jacquelin Kataneksza
Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Zolberg Institute on Migration and Mobility
Dr. Jacquelin Kataneksza is a Postdoctoral Research Scholar at the Zolberg Institute on Migration and Mobility. She holds a PhD in Public and Urban Policy from The Milano School of Policy, Management, and Environment and a master’s degree in international Affairs from the Julien J. Studley Graduate Programs in International Affairs in New York. Her research focuses on the mobile and often provisional ways that people living in precarious contexts mediate daily life, often across country borders. She has most recently published in Cities: The International Journal of Urban Planning and Policy.
Zolberg Institute Book Talk Series
This webinar is part of a series of book talks organized by the Zolberg Institute on Mobility and Migration to discuss a wide range of contemporary books dealing with subjects related to immigration, migration, displacement, the refugee system, conflict, and mobility. Search our events page for recordings of previous book talks and upcoming webinars.