IISER MOHALI

Abstract: In this lecture, Richa Nagar will discuss some key concepts, challenges, and possibilities offered in Radical Vulnerability: Development, Translation, Justice (Women Unlimited 2024), the South Asian edition of her book, Hungry Translations: Relearning the world through radical vulnerability (University of Illinois Press 2019). The book draws on over two decades of Nagar's creative journeys with the Sangtin Kisan Mazdoor Sangathan, Parakh Theatre, and students at the University of Minnesota, and it explores the co-constitutive labours involved in the making of movement, theatre, theory, and pedagogy.

About the speaker: Richa Nagar is the inaugural Gloria Steinem ’56 Endowed Chair in Women and Gender Studies at Smith College. Her multi-lingual and multi-genre work in transnational feminism and praxis & poetics of collaboration and co-authorship has evolved across the borders of India, Tanzania, & USA. This work agitates stabilized ways of knowing and telling through collective creativity to build enduring alliances with people’s struggles for justice. As a scholar, writer, cultural worker, educator, and organizer, Richa refuses the borders of academia- arts-activism, while also re/telling, claiming, and theorizing the emotional, political, and analytical labors of such blurring and offering such critical concepts as situated solidarities, radical vulnerability, & hungry translations. Richa has published nine books and dozens of essays, articles, plays, and poems (and their translations) in English and Hindi. Her work has been translated into German, Italian, Korean, Mandarin, Marathi, Turkish, and Urdu. She has worked closely with the Sangtin Kisan Mazdoor Sangathan, a movement of farmers and laborers in India’s Sitapur District, since its founding, and she has co-created a multi-sited community theatre project called Parakh and the online journal, Agitate.