Join us for a colloquium exploring how affect—emotions, obligations, and social bonds—shapes political life, state power, and personal identity across diverse contexts. This event will feature:

Zainab Khalid (Queen’s University) – Monsters, Lesbians, Mothers: The Ontological Void
Examining love, respectability, and queer kinship in Pakistani Muslim middle-class households, Khalid explores how social fictions shape belonging, rejection, and alternative forms of care.

Rashmi Banerjee (University of Virginia) – Mercy for Murder: Illegitimacy, Infanticide, and Criminal Justice in Colonial India
Tracing colonial India's paradoxical views on infanticide, Banerjee reveals how the British state oscillated between criminalizing and sympathizing with women accused of transgressing rigid patriarchal norms.

Jowel Choufani (George Washington University) – Scripting Obligation Amidst Chronic State Abandonment: An Analysis of Everyday Speech in Lebanon
Through an ethnographic study of café begging encounters and community kitchens, Choufani examines how language practices shape social obligations and care networks in Lebanon’s ongoing economic collapse. This colloquium will offer critical insights into the entanglements of affect, power, and political life, fostering a discussion on how emotions and social structures coalesce in shaping governance, survival, and resistance.