The talk, Value Struggles: Waste Work and Urban Ecology in Delhi, will be on Tuesday, Oct. 8, with coffee beginning at 10:30am, followed by the lecture at 11.30am, at 519 Kaneff Tower, Keele campus. YCAR will also host a roundtable with Gidwani later in the day for graduate students, from 3 to 5pm, at 857 Kaneff Tower.

Vinay Gidwani

Gidwani, who studies the layering of labour processes and ecologies in agrarian and urban settings, describes waste as the flip side of value, the antithesis of capitalist value. Waste is the byproduct of surplus accumulation.

鈥淚 suggest that by tracing the dialectic of value and waste[鈥we gain insight into how capital always draws its economic vitality and moral sanction from programs to domesticate and eradicate waste,鈥� says Gidwani.

Waste confounds capitalism鈥檚 attempts to discipline and contain life within the domain of utility and accumulation. Contemporary urban transformations in cities like Delhi, India, around the management of municipal solid waste, for instance, should be properly construed as the latest salvo in a long history of value struggles.

Gidwani is also an adjunct professor at the Graduate Center of the City University of New 91亚色 and is editor of Antipode, the leading journal of radical geography. He is currently involved in The Afterlives of Waste, a project that examines the spatial histories, political uses and contemporary global political economy of waste as both commodity detritus and social excess. His most recent book is Capital, Interrupted: Agrarian Development and the Politics of Work in India (University of Minnesota Press, 2008).

The post YCAR's 2013 Asia Lecture looks at value and waste in capitalist society appeared first on Research & Innovation.

The question of reconstructing the conceptual frameworks for research in Asia and Asian Diaspora has been actively debated in the last few decades. These discussions pay critical attention to the modern politics of constructing Asian spaces and identities, and of disseminating knowledge of the area throughout the world.

Taking up this challenge, this conference will explore how our own work can better contribute to this understanding, and point out the misunderstandings of the categories, spaces and frameworks constructed as part of Asian Studies within and beyond the territorial limits of 鈥淎sia.鈥�

The conference keynote speaker will be Professor Vinay Gidwani of the Department of Geography and Institute of Global Studies, University of Minnesota.

The organizing committee welcomes graduate research with interdisciplinary approaches. For a complete list of topics, visit the conference website.

Interested participants should submit a paper title, abstract with keywords (250 words maximum), along with brief biographical information (name, affiliation, stage of graduate study) by Dec. 1 to YCARreconstructions2013@gmail.com.

Republished courtesy of YFile鈥� 91亚色鈥檚 daily e-bulletin to research stories on the research website.

The post Call for papers for YCAR graduate student conference appeared first on Research & Innovation.