18 – Violent Encounters: Understanding Violence as a “Form” of Social Experience in South Asia

October 3, 2025
3:45 pm
H08
This panel seeks to examine violence as a major ground and determinant of social experience in South Asia. Whether seen at the macro level—as an instrument of state and majoritarian control or as a liberatory tactic by racialized, minoritized, and subaltern groups—or at more micro levels of society and the body politic, violence as a social phenomenon remains conceptually intractable. Yet, it is invariably connected to multiple, often conflicting, systems of valuation and judgment. The panel will investigate varied articulations of violence that mark the social space in South Asia and shape the dynamics of both human and interspecies relations in the subcontinent. Could we think of violence as constitutive of life-forms or are the uses and experiences of violence always spatiotemporally contingent? Do particular historical conjunctures engender particular forms of violence? For example, has the global expansion of industrial capitalism produced qualitatively novel forms of violence? How does violence relate to questions of corporeality, sentience, (inter)subjectivity, and individual and social consciousness? Are there degrees or intensities of violence that correspond to varying thresholds of pain, and if so, how? What kinds of expressive means and resources do people garner to render lived encounters with violence visible? Questions like these necessitate examining violence as a relational ground that mediates human experience with economic, sociopolitical, and ecological spheres of life. This panel proposes to explore how the presence of violence in South Asian social milieus is/has been perceived, understood, analyzed, defined, and represented and using what kinds of conceptual, moral, epistemological, or aesthetic frames. We welcome contributions that analyze violence as both sociological fact and phenomenological experience, while also considering the possibilities and limitations of representing violence.

Convenor

Valentina Barnabei

Presentations

Communal Violence and Cow Protection in Early Hindi Novels: Negotiating Harmony and Historical Memory
WISNIEWSKA-SINGH JUSTYNA - Faculty of Oriental Studies, University of Warsaw, WARSAW, Poland
The Social Life of Sexualized Violence: Rape and its Discourses in India’s Recent History
Waxman Rebecca - UCLA, UCLA, Los Angeles, United States
Depiction of Violence and Studying Literature: A Comparative Literary Perspective.
Mukherjee Soma - Visva-Bharati, Visva-Bharati, Bolpur, India
From Bhagat to Guru: Epistemic Violence and the Ravidassia Challenge to Sikh Orthodoxy
Kumar Prashant - Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Delhi, Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Delhi, Delhi, India
Mobility as Violence: Dalit Women’s Negotiations, Resistance, and the Limits of Sanskritization
Kotamraju Priyanka - University of Cambridge, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, United Kingdom
The Violence of Protection: Child Labour Laws and the Suppression of Agency
Jain Khushboo - Institut für Soziologie, Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, Erlangen, Germany
Challenging Spatial and Cultural Exclusion: Narratives of Pandemic Realities and Labor Struggles in Delhi’s Bastis
Barnabei Valentina - Department of Asian and North African Studies (DSAAM), Ca' Foscari University of Venice, Venice, Italy