Nitasha Kaul talks to Meena Dhanda: Writing Conflicts: The Idea of Kashmir

Faculty of Arts, Business and Social Sciences Research Seminar Series
University of Wolverhampton
The webinar was recorded on Thursday 25th March 2021
Kashmir is a real and imagined place of complicated histories, competing desires, and multiple conflicts. Nitasha Kaul will be in conversation with Meena Dhanda in this event about #writing and #conflict. She will speak about navigating the affective and analytical domains in relation to Kashmir across the genres of poetry, fiction, and scholarly writing. She will also discuss her recent novel Future Tense that traces the competing trajectories of #modernity and #tradition, freedom and suffocation, and the possibility of bridging the stories of different kinds of Kashmiris.
Speakers: Dr Nitasha Kaul & Prof Meena Dhanda
Dr Nitasha Kaul (PhD, MSc, BA Hons) is a multidisciplinary academic, novelist, poet, and economist. Over the last two decades, she has researched and published extensively on themes relating to democracy, political economy, identity, rise of right-wing nationalism, feminist and postcolonial critiques, Bhutan, India, and Kashmir. Her books include Imagining Economics Otherwise (Routledge, 2007); Future Tense (Harper Collins, 2020); Man-Asian Literary Prize shortlisted Residue (Rainlight, 2014); co-edited Economic & Political Weekly volume on Women and Kashmir (December 2018) and Can you Hear Kashmiri Women Speak? (Kali for Women Press, 2020).
Meena Dhanda is Professor of Philosophy and Cultural Politics. Her research focus is on understanding injustices, prejudices and misrepresentations suffered by powerless groups, which she pursues through transdisciplinary studies, specifically connecting caste, class, gender, and race. Her work includes: The Negotiation of Personal Identity (2008) and Reservations for Women (2008), besides papers in international journals, book chapters and reference works. She holds a doctorate from Oxford University, where she was a Commonwealth Scholar and a Rhodes Junior Research Fellow. Her recent publications are on philosophical foundations of anti-casteism (2020) and the power of counter-ritual (2021).