The workshop pays particular attention to the infrastructures of im/mobility that mediate these moments: caste, kinship, village, and diaspora networks; labour brokers and intermediaries; advance-debt and contract (verbal and written) systems; and the overlapping legal and extra-legal orders, environmental determinants, and bureaucratic governance that, across the pre-colonial, colonial, and postcolonial periods, simultaneously governed migration and were renegotiated by it. How these infrastructures both facilitated movement and reproduced SADs, and how the same networks and instruments were utilised to pursue survival, accumulation, social mobility, subsistence, or escape, is a central question of the workshop. The workshop lays emphasis on examining how SADs mutate and persist within a mobility regime, and how workers negotiate them, even as they are shaped by them.
Submission guidelines
Please submit an abstract of up to 500 words with a brief biography (100 words) to mobilitysouthasia@gmail.com by 20th September 2026. Any queries can also be directed to the same email. Selected participants will be notified by early November 2026 and invited to submit a draft paper of 4,000–5,000 words by 10th January 2027.
For more information, read the full open call here.