Faculty at School of Humanities and Social Sciences

Yasmeen Arif

Yasmeen Arif

Professor and Head of Department


Contact Information

Politics of life; theory, philosophy and epistemology in social anthropology/sociology; urban studies, international law and humanitarianisms, science and technology studies, money, visual and material cultures.

MA (Sociology) Delhi School of Economics, University of Delhi MPhil Delhi School of Economics, University of Delhi Ph.D. Delhi School of Economics, University of Delhi

Department of Sociology, Delhi School of Economics, University of Delhi, Delhi University of Minnesota ( Twin Cities), Twin Cities The Graduate Institute, Geneva The American University of Beirut, Beirut University of California , Los Angeles CSDS, Delhi

Yasmeen Arif was awarded the Sawyer Seminar Mellon Post-Doctoral Fellowship in the Seminar Humanitarianisms and World Orders? at the University of Minnesota ( U of M, Twin Cities). Arif has also held a Quadrant Fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Study at the U of M, Twin Cities. A recent award has been the Fulbright-Nehru Senior Research Fellowship. She has also been the recepient of the Nehru Memorial Doctoral Fellowship as well as the Sephis Doctoral Fellowship ( Netherlands). She has been part of research projects which have been awarded funding support by the Ford Foundation, and IDPAD.


2022.(July). India in World Anthropology: Empire. Colony, Nation. Invited essay for a Wenner Gen Forum curated by Gustavo Lins Rebeiro titled Pathways to Anthropological Futures.
https://wennergren.org/online-forums/

2021. December. Urban Anthropology: India. International Encyclopedia of Anthropology. Available at:
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/9781118924396.wbiea2472

2021. “The Reluctant Native: Decolonizing Ontologies and Epistemic Disobedience”. Invited essay for HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory. Vol 11(1):256-263.

2021. April. “Crisis: A Note for the Humanitarian Encyclopedia” https://humanitarianencyclopedia.org/expertise-note/crisis-a-note-for-the-humanitarian-encyclopedia


2021. “Calling a Pandemic by its Name.” Society and Culture in South Asia. Vol 7(1): 97-104.

2020. April. “Life and the Interim”. Essay on the Covid-19 situation from a bio-political perspective.        Diacritics, Journal of Critical Theory. Available at https://www.diacriticsjournal.com/life-and- the-interim/

2020. “We Don’t need Another Hero.” In Special Section, “Trial by Fire”. Commoning Ethnography  Vol (3):117-122.


2016. “Anthropologizing the World and Worlding the Anthropologist.” American Anthropologist Vol. 118(4): 848-851

2015. “The Audacity of Method” Economic and Political Weekly (Special Article) Vol. L (1): 53-61

Books

2016. Yasmeen Arif. Life, Emergent. The Social in the Afterlives of Violence. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

2018. (Co- Edited.) Yasmeen Arif et al. Critical Themes in Indian Sociology (50th Year of Contributions to Indian Sociology) New Delhi: Sage Publications.

 

Book Chapters

2022.  “Visceral Publics and Social Power: Crowd Politics in the Time of a Pandemic”. In “ The Viral Politics of Covid-19: Nature, Home, and Planetary Health. Miguel Vatter and Vanessa Lems (eds).Palgrave Macmillan. Series : BioLegalities. (129-144).

2022. Beyond the Postcolonial: Speculations for an Indian Contemporary. In Gita Chadha and Renny Thomas (eds), Mapping Scientific Method: Disciplinary Narrations. Routledge India.
https://www.routledge.com/Mapping-Scientific-Method-Disciplinary-Narrations/Chadha-Thomas/p/book/9781032273525

2015. “Communitas and Recovered Life”. In Roma Chatterji (ed.) Wording the World: Veena Das and the Scenes of Inheritance. New York: Fordham University Press. ( 54 -171).

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  • 8th June 2022. University of Bergen Summer School for Doctoral Students (International). Lecture titled: The Government of Identity
  • Theme: Understanding and addressing inequality: Sustainability, social justice and hope. Bergen, Norway. 7-17 June 2022
  • https://www.uib.no/en/rs/bsrs
  • 13th June 2022. Panel Discussion on Keith Hart’s book: Self in the World-Connecting Life’s Extremes. South Asian University, Delhi, India. Department of Sociology Seminar Series.
  • 28th June 2022. Invited Key-Note Speaker for Joint Digital Lecture Series: Making Sense of the Post-Covid World - Continuities and Changes. Organized by Humboldt Foundation, Frie Univesitat, Berlin and others.
  • Title of lecture: The Space between Us, Biophilosophies of Identities in Pandemic Spaces.
  • Available at: https://youtu.be/p-Gj21DsdoI
  • November 4th, 2021. As invited speaker in live webinar on Beyond Extractivism: Toward New Collaborative Futures in Anthropology. Wenner-Gren Symposium organized in the Series on : “Toward a Radically Humanist Anthropology,” in collaboration with   the Association of Black Anthropologists, Anthropology Southern Africa, and the Center for Experimental Ethnography.
  • August 27th, 2021. "Visceral publics and social power : Crowd Politics in the time of a Pandemic" at 'Viral Politics' - a virtual symposium on Viral Politics hosted by the Alfred Deakin Institute for Citizenship and Globalisation, Deakin University, Australia.
  • May 27th, 2021. The Government of Identity. Round Table Title: Sexuality, Political Economy, and the Law: New and Old Materialisms
  • Law and Society Association Virtual Conference/May 26-30 ( anchored in Chicago)
  • Feb 10th, 2021. Body.Space.Social. Invited Plenary Speaker. Globalization and New Terrains of Consciousness. Jamia Milia Islamia, MHRD and the University of Wurzberg.
  • Jan 15th, 2021. Keynote Address. Life per se. Graduate Students Conference. Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, India.
  • Nov 1st, 2019. Humanity, Identity, Biopolitics Symposium. School of Social Sciences. University of Sydney, Australia.
  • July 23-24th. 2019.Cosmopolitics. Invited workshop. Shiv Nader University, UP, India
  • Sept19th - 21st, 2018. The Hierarchies of Knowing Life: The Event of a Suicide Note. Egalitarianism, Hierarchy and Global Intellectual Labour beyond the West Workshop. University of Bergen - NIAS. Bengaluru, India.
  • May 3 - 4, 2018. For an Aesthetics of Identity, Or, Against the Fetish of Difference. Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, Gottingen, Germany.
  • November 16, 2016. Life, Emergent: The Social in the Afterlives of Violence. Panel discussion on my book. University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, USA.
  • October 12, 2016. Culture of Money. The University of Sydney Business School, Discipline of Business Law. Australia.
  • October 13, 2016. Emotional Cities: The Urban as the Frontier of Crises and Compassion. Dept. of Sociology and Social Theory. University of Sydney, Australia.
  • November 2015. Thinking World Anthropologies with Derrida. Invited Executive Roundtable titled “Between World Anthropologies and World Anthropology: towards a reflexive critique of the mediation processes” organized by the Transnational Relations and Collaborations Sub-Committee of the AAA. (WCAA). Denver, USA.
  • April 2015. Crime and Punishment in International Law: Humanity as the Final Sovereign. South Asian University. Delhi, India.
  • February 2015. Cinema and the Undoing of History: Proposing Universal Memory as a Politics of Life. Opening lecture, Workshop on “Memory, Violence and Cinema”. Graduate Institute of International Studies. Geneva, Switzerland.

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Since Feb 2022: Joint Task Force on Global Knowledge Production Practices, World Council for Anthropological Associations (WCAA)

Since July 2022. Affiliate in the GRIP ( Global Research Program on Inequality) program anchored at the University of Bergen, Norway. Details at:
Affiliates – GRIP (gripinequality.org)