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Poverty, Inequality & the State Conference

Poverty reduction has long been a major policy issue for government officials and success in doing so a measure of the overall legitimacy of the state. Concerns with poverty alleviation in South Asia date back at least to the colonial British state during
the 19th century; from at least the late 19th century, leading Indian nationalists made the failure of the colonial state in reducing poverty one of their most potent attacks on the legitimacy of British rule over the Indian subcontinent. The alleviation of poverty continued as one of the most powerful moral imperatives articulated by the new nation-states after 1947.

Lurking behind debates on poverty, inequality, and the state are two central and inter-related issues that we intend to explore in our January 2008 Conference on Poverty, Inequality, and the State in South Asia. First, we draw needed attention to the everyday lived experiences and self-definitions of “the poor” themselves. In particular, we will explore understandings of poverty as a condition that people with weak social entitlements define and experience in relation to seasonal and annual cycles of employment and health. How do these “bottom-up” lived understandings of poverty differ from the “ideas of poverty” commonly produced by officials and embedded in
their income and health statistics and analyses?

Second, our conference will consider the ways in which competing projects of state-making in South Asia shape understandings of the basic nature of the state and, thereby, its relationship to and role vis-à-vis poverty. We will, thus, consider how competing state-making projects involving processes of democratization and decentralization in which various social groups (including “the poor”) struggle to re-draw and re-define the state-society boundary in South Asia have extremely important implications for how poverty is understood and the kinds of poverty-reduction policies that are formulated and implemented.

The conference will consist of a series of interdisciplinary panels that bring together economists, public health workers, political scientists, anthropologists, sociologists, and historians whose work explores either the employment and health aspects of the everyday lived experiences of poverty or modern state-making projects in relation to poverty reduction in various regions in South Asia.

Co-sponsored by UNC-CH College of Arts and Sciences, UNC-CH Center for Global Initiatives, UNC-CH Frank Hawkins Kenan Institute of Private Enterprise, The School of Social Work, UNC-CH, Carolina Asia Center, UNC-CH Center for Urban and Regional Studies, and the Duke Global Health Initiative. For more info: contact sandria.freitag@duke.edu

Conference Schedule

Friday, January 11, 2008

1:00-1:15 PM: Welcome and Introductory Remarks
1:15-3:00 PM: Session I: The Production of Poverty & the Production of the State; Lauren Minsky (History, NCSU), “Sanitizing Inequality as Poverty Alleviation in Colonial Punjab” download paper; Akhil Gupta (Anthropology, UCLA), "Literacy, Bureaucratic Domination, and Democracy" download paper; Respondent: David Gilmartin (History, NCSU)
3:15-5:15 PM: Session II: Neoliberalism, NGOs and Poverty; Lamia Karim (Anthropology, Univ of Oregon), “Evicting the State: NGOs as Liberal Actors in Bangladesh” download paper; Chad Haines (Anthropology, American University in Cairo),
“The Role of Developmentalism in the Making of ‘Marginality’ and ‘Backwardness’ “; Nandini Gooptu (Hist/Poli Sci, Oxford), “New Visions of the City and the poor in contemporary India” download paper

Respondent: Vijayendra Rao (World Bank Research)
RECEPTION FOLLOWING

Saturday, January 12, 2008

9:00-11:00 AM: Session III: Lived Experience and the Perception of Poverty; Megan Moodie (Anthropology, Duke Sawyer Seminar Postdoc), “If Trees are Strong: On women, democracy, and infant death in Rajasthan” download paper; Cecilia Van Hollen (Med Anthro, Syracuse), “Poverty, Gender and the State: Views from Women Living with HIV/AIDS in Tamil Nadu, India”; Kim Blankenship (Yale), “Gender, Poverty, and Health: Experiences of Women Sex Workers in Southern India”

Respondent: Hillary Bracken (GYNUITY, Virginia)

11:15-1:15 PM: Session IV: Politics, Poverty and Inequality; Suraj Jacob (Political Economy, Stanford), “Is Political Competition Good for Development?" download paper; Srikrishna Ayyangar (Political Science, Syracuse),
"Populist Mobilization and Micro-credit Programs in South
India" download paper; Vijayendra Rao (World Bank Research), "The Political Construction of Caste in South India." download paper

Respondent: Anirudh Krishna (Political Science/Public Policy, Duke)
LUNCH: 1:15-2:15

2:15-4:15 PM: Session V: Political Participation and Agency of the Poor; Amita Baviskar (Development, IEG), “Extraordinary Violence
and Everyday Welfare: The State and Poverty in Rural and Urban India” download paper; Anupama Rao (History, Barnard), “Caste and the Colonial City: Dalit Life and Labor in Bombay”; Holly Sims (Political Science, SUNY-Albany), “Pakistan’s Chronic Socio-Economic Inequality and the Rural Poor’s Constricted Political Participation” download paper

Respondent: Meenu Tewari (Dept. of City and Regional Planning, UNC-Chapel Hill)

Sunday, January 13, 2008

9:30 AM: Wrap-Up Round Table; Anirudh Krishna
Meenu Tewari
David Gilmartin
Yasmin Saikia
Harihar Bhattarai
Michael Emch
Lauren Leve
Respondents from World Bank and other Multilateral agencies