Saturday, February 8, 2020, 2 – 4pm

Join us in discussion of a fearless new approach to the search for poetic and social justice.

Experts often assume that the poor, hungry, rural, and/or precarious need external interventions. They frequently fail to recognize how the same people create politics and knowledge by living and honing their own dynamic visions. How might scholars and teachers working in the Global North ethically participate in producing knowledge in ways that connect across different meanings of struggle, hunger, hope, and the good life? 

Informed by over twenty years of experiences in India and the United States, Hungry Translations bridges these divides with a fresh approach to academic theorizing. Through in-depth reflections on her collaborations with activists, theater artists, writers, and students, Richa Nagar discusses the ongoing work of building embodied alliances among those who occupy different locations in predominant hierarchies. She argues that such alliances can sensitively engage difference through a kind of full-bodied immersion and translation that refuses comfortable closures or transparent renderings of meanings. While the shared and unending labor of politics makes perfect translation—or retelling—impossible, hungry translations strive to make our knowledges more humble, more tentative, and more alive to the creativity of struggle.

Richa Nagar is Professor of the College in the College of Liberal Arts and a core faculty member in the Department of Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Minnesota. Her books include Muddying the Waters: Coauthoring Feminisms across Scholarship and Activism, Playing with Fire: Feminist Thought and Activism through Seven Lives in India, and A World of Difference: Encountering and Contesting Difference.

Elizabeth Sumida Huaman is Wanka and Quechua from the Peruvian Andes. She teaches at the University of Minnesota. An Indigenous comparative and international education researcher, her work focuses on the link between Indigenous land and natural resources and cultural and educational practices in the U.S., Canada, and Peru. Her research projects include collaborative studies with Indigenous communities and institutions on Indigenous knowledge systems, community-based education and environmental/sustainability studies, and Indigenous women’s narratives.

Ajay Skaria teaches at the University of Minnesota. He is the author, most recently, of Unconditional Equality: Gandhi’s Religion of Resistance (University of Minnesota Press, 2016). He is currently working on two books. One of these explores the tensions and relations between three concepts of secularism; another, tentatively titled Ambedkar’s Revolutions, draws on the theme of revolution as a point of entry into the thinking and politics of Dr. Bhimrao Ambedkar.

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